{"id":907,"date":"2020-09-08T10:18:32","date_gmt":"2020-09-08T17:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=907"},"modified":"2025-07-20T16:56:35","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T23:56:35","slug":"jokers-to-the-right-of-me-2020","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/jokers-to-the-right-of-me-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Jokers to the Right of Me (2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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National Institutes of Health Poster, 2020<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Many on the Right, including libertarians, brushed off the COVID-19 pandemic. It wasn’t real, it didn’t matter, it would go away, and the government’s push for distancing and masks was an invasion of personal rights. Some went further, saying the pandemic was a trumped-up reason to increase politicians’ power and foist upon the people dangerous vaccines sponsored by Bill and Melinda Gates.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>

Even President Trump downplayed COVID in a blustering way. The Left pilloried him for it and the Right defended him. I thought the Right was wrong. I wrote the following piece in mid-March, attacking the libertarian web page LewRockwell.com. The Liberty web page didn’t usually run pieces attacking other libertarians, but this time it did. The piece was posted on March 31, 2020.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 So many people on the Right want to brush off the COVID-19 pandemic. I don\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Libertarians notice when government grows. And it is doing that.\u00a0CNN, to which I have been listening, harasses Trump for having acted too slowly and done too little, no matter how much he does.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>On that channel, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, drones on and on like Fidel Castro, alternately demanding help and declaring that President Trump has not done enough. Trump, for his part, has considered the \u201cquarantine\u201d of New York, whatever that would mean.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Government is flexing its muscles. Politicians are showing off. But what I\u2019m hearing from corners of the Right is more than that: the accusation that the government has\u00a0cooked up<\/i>\u00a0a crisis out of a not-very-important flu bug in order to control us permanently. In other words, that the COVID-19 threat is essentially a hoax. This is absurd, but enough people on the Right are saying it that\u00a0<\/span>even the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0has noticed it.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>I\u2019m embarrassed to quote some of these people. A commenter on my last posting to\u00a0Liberty\u00a0<\/i>writes: \u201cThis is a government-initiated economic assault engineered to provide a disguise for the bigger collapse that was inevitably coming anyway due to the insane Keynesian policies practiced for decades. The flimsy \u2018public health\u2019 excuse was capitalized on to provide a more acceptable \u2018cause\u2019 for the subsequent debacle rather than their own guilty profligate irresponsibility.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>In other words, the economy was heading over a cliff, so the lunatics in charge decided to wreck it first, so they could pin the blame on a virus. Does that make sense? Whose economy are we talking about, America\u2019s? China\u2019s? Italy\u2019s? Who decided to blow it up, the Federal Reserve? The U.S. Public Health Service? The People\u2019s Liberation Army? The Illuminati? And how would\u00a0you<\/i>\u00a0know this?<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>The zanies who spout this stuff assume an air of all-knowing assurance. They have been cut in on the secret, and you, who have not, are a simpleton.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Somebody has to reply to these people.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Let\u2019s start with Lew Rockwell, who runs the libertarian web page LewRockwell.com (\u201cAnti-state, anti-war, pro-market\u201d). His web page used to be mainly Austrian economics, a non-mainstream theory that has much to say about business cycles, interest rates, the role of entrepreneurs and the impossibility of an efficient socialism. I\u2019m sorry to report that Rockwell has allowed LewRockwell.com to become a Hyde Park Corner for coronavirus skeptics.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Most of the articles are by others, but now and then Rockwell chimes in. His March 21 column on coronavirus and the economy is sarcastically titled \u201c<\/span>The End of Civilization?<\/span><\/a>\u201d In it, he starts out talking about Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and the division of labor, then moves on to microbiology. Rockwell dismisses the threat from COVID-19, writing that it has killed fewer than 100 people in the United States. As I write, nine days later, the US death toll is more than 2,950 and confirmed cases more than 160,000.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>President Trump now says it will be a \u201cvictory\u201d if the American toll is kept to 100,000 dead.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>In \u201cThe End of Civilization?\u201d Rockwell takes on the Trump administration\u2019s public-health leader, Dr. Anthony Fauci. \u201cIf anything,\u201d Rockwell declares, \u201cwhat people like Fauci and the other fearmongers are demanding will likely make the disease worse. The martial law they dream about will leave people hunkered down inside their homes instead of going outdoors or to the beach where the sunshine and fresh air would help boost immunity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>I live in Seattle, 20 miles from the\u00a0<\/span>first case<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of coronavirus in the United States, and in the urban area with the infamous\u00a0<\/span>coronavirus nursing home<\/span><\/a>. There is no martial law here. Or anywhere in America, judging from what I see on the news. Why do right-wingers talk this way? And why would the proprietor of a free-market webpage challenge the public-health advice of the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases? Where would Rockwell get the idea that we could all stop the coronavirus pandemic by flocking to the beach and lying in the sun?<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>I think he absorbed it from his favorite medical journalist, megavitamin guru Bill Sardi. Sardi is the author of\u00a0<\/span>In Search of the World’s Best Water<\/span><\/i><\/a>,\u00a0<\/span><\/i>The Bible Prescription for Health and Longevity<\/span><\/i><\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>How to Live 100 Years Without Growing Old<\/span><\/i><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>This year, Sardi has contributed more than 30 articles to LewRockwell.com.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>When coronavirus first hit the news in January, Sardi wrote on LewRockwell.com that it was \u201c<\/span>just a common cold virus<\/span><\/a>\u201d and that, \u201call the advice to stay away from crowds, wear a mask, wash your hands, is silly.\u201d On January 29,\u00a0Sardi wrote<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that the spread of the new coronavirus was mainly caused by the lack of sunshine and could best be managed with Vitamin D.\u00a0<\/span>On February 1<\/span><\/a>, Sardi called COVID-19 \u201ca contrived pandemic, brought to you by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control, and a committee that planned the whole event in order to gain public funding for a vaccine and to prime the global masses with fear for the first attempt of a worldwide vaccination campaign.\u201d He declared that the photos of dead bodies lying on the streets of Wuhan, were \u201cfaked.\u201d He later suggested that the stink in Wuhan of burning corpses was from the cremation of pigs. On February 19, he suggested that the pandemic was \u201c<\/span>political cover for a sour economy<\/span><\/a>.\u201d And on February 27 he recommended that people go out and\u00a0<\/span>catch COVID-19 on purpose<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/i><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>In a piece on LewRockwell.com on March 23, Sardi continued to insist that the wearing of face masks and washing of hands were \u201c<\/span>meaningless<\/span><\/a>,\u201d and that reports of an increase in COVID-19 cases were a \u201cruse.\u201d On LRC on March 27, Sardi\u00a0<\/span>quoted a Korean study<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that claims that COVID-19 is not contagious during its incubation period. And on March 28, he wrote, \u201cThe coronavirus is a planned distraction,\u201d a \u201c<\/span>phony epidemic<\/span><\/a>,\u201d the \u201cunfolding death of a nation.\u201d On March 30 he suggested that the doctors treating coronavirus patients can\u2019t tell the difference between COVID-19 and\u00a0<\/span>zinc deficiency<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>OK, enough of this joker. Here\u2019s another, Eric Peters, a man who does not even pretend to be a medical expert. His web page is\u00a0<\/span>ericpetersautos.com<\/span><\/a>, where he writes about automobiles. That, and libertarian politics. In his March 23 blast of skepticism, \u201c<\/span>The Cat Leaves the Bag<\/span><\/a>,\u201d Peters writes, \u201cWhere are the people doubling over in the streets, coughing up blood? The stacks of bodies, \u2018overwhelming\u2019 the system. None such.\u201d This isn\u2019t a zombie flick. No coughing up blood. But look at Spain. In Madrid, the Spanish Army is collecting COVID-19 corpses and\u00a0<\/span>piling them in an ice-skating rink<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>In his March 29 offering, Peters is asking the same question: \u201cWell, where are the bodies?\u201d He writes that he\u00a0drove by<\/i>\u00a0his local hospital, Carilion Roanoke Memorial in Roanoke, Virginia, \u201cand did not see refrigerator trucks of corpses or any sign that anything was out of the ordinary.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

Did he go in and talk to anybody? No.\u00a0<\/span>His local newspaper did<\/span><\/a>, and found the staff preparing for battle. \u201c<\/span>First Coronavirus Death Reported in Alleghany Health District<\/span><\/a>,\u201d reported the\u00a0Roanoke Times<\/i>\u00a0on the same day Peters posted on LewRockwell.com.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Now to the biowarfare thesis \u2014 the black-helicopter suspicion that somebody\u2019s nasty government (maybe ours!) cooked up COVID-19 as a weapon. Larry Romanoff of\u00a0<\/span>Global Research<\/span><\/a>, whatever that is, says in a piece\u00a0<\/span>republished by Lew Rockwell<\/span><\/a>\u00a0on March 24 that the Italians, South Koreans, and Chinese have been unable to identify an original source of the infection or a \u201cpatient zero.\u201d Their failure to do this, Romanoff argues, is \u201cvirtually\u00a0prima facie<\/i>\u00a0evidence of a pathogen deliberately released.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>This is what I call a\u00a0von D\u00e4niken\u00a0argument. Fifty years ago a Swiss fabulist named Erich von\u00a0D\u00e4niken\u00a0wrote a bestselling tract called\u00a0Chariots of the Gods.\u00a0<\/i>In it he asserted that the earth had been visited by ancient astronauts who left behind the Nazca lines in Peru and the stone heads on Easter Island. I remember seeing a TV show about it. Von D\u00e4niken\u2019s\u00a0argument was that archaeologists could not explain how ancient humans made the Nazca lines or the stone heads (just as the Italians,\u00a0et al<\/i>., cannot identify who seeded the virus) and therefore it must be true that \u201cancient astronauts\u201d had made those things. There was more to the book than that, but that was the argument that stuck in my mind. Ever since then, I have thought of a \u201cvon D\u00e4niken\u00a0argument\u201d as one in which the ordinary explanation is dismissed as impossible, thereby \u201cproving\u201d the extraordinary one. Essentially it is the setting aside of reality for a fable.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>That the Italians, the Koreans, and the Chinese have been unable to find a patient zero proves nothing. It\u2019s nearly impossible to track a disease that can be spread for more than a week by people who don\u2019t know they have it and can infect others merely by touching door handles. And think also what is being asserted here: that someone cooked up COVID-19 as a\u00a0weapon<\/i>. What kind of weapon would that be? A weapon to do what? The new weapons of the past few decades \u2014 TV-guided bombs and drone-guided missiles \u2014 have been designed to aim at smaller and smaller targets with precision. COVID-19 would be a weapon that cannot be aimed at all \u2014 a weapon that hits you as well as the other guy. You pull the trigger and the whole world is infected, with a kill ratio of 11% (Italy), 4% (China), 1.5% (USA) and 0.5% (Germany). What would such a \u201cweapon\u201d be\u00a0for?<\/i><\/span><\/p>

And note that Romanoff\u2019s \u201cvirtually\u00a0prima facie<\/i>\u00a0evidence\u201d is the\u00a0absence<\/i>\u00a0of evidence.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>That\u2019s a\u00a0von D\u00e4niken\u00a0argument.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>In \u201c<\/span>After the Lockdown: A Global Coronavirus Vaccination Program<\/span><\/a>,\u201d run on LewRockwell.com on March 23, Professor Michel Chossudovsky,\u00a0<\/span>a Canadian promoter of 9\/11 conspiracy theories<\/span><\/a>, makes what seems like a\u00a0von D\u00e4niken\u00a0argument. Chossudovsky calls the panic over COVID-19 \u201ca propaganda campaign\u201d to implement a \u201cglobal vaccine\u201d being prepared by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a group funded by the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (This is what Bill Sardi was writing about.) There is, in fact, such a group funded by Bill and Melinda Gates, and it is working on vaccines, just as Chossudovsky says. If it develops an effective vaccine, Bill and Melinda want it given to people all over the world. I saw Bill on CNN and he said so, himself. He has been warning for several years of the threat from epidemics, and he is donating money to develop a vaccine to fight this one. To me, it\u2019s a commendable thing that Microsoft\u2019s founder and former CEO would devote the last half of his career to work with his wife to fight disease. Chossudovsky portrays Bill and Melinda\u2019s motives as dark and conspiratorial. \u201cWhat kind of twisted social structure awaits us in the wake of the lockdown?\u201d he writes. \u201cCan we trust the World Health Organization (WHO) and the powerful economic interest groups behind it? This is an act of \u2018economic warfare\u2019 against humanity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Chossudovsky doesn\u2019t bother giving reasons to doubt what Bill and Melinda Gates say they are doing. Chossudovsky just assumes that\u00a0of course<\/i>\u00a0they are putting on a false front. Through a miasma of loaded words, he suggests that their\u00a0real\u00a0<\/i>motives are twisted and weird, tied to \u201cpowerful economic interest groups.\u201d Some people love stuff like that. They eat it up. The man who dishes it out doesn\u2019t have to\u00a0argue<\/i>\u00a0for anything. He just has to lower his voice and tell a creepy story.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>This pandemic has prompted altogether too much talk of\u00a0false fronts, fake news, hoaxes, and killer vaccines. The reasonable Right has got to disown this stuff and get real.<\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>If the public-health professionals say a virus is a mortal danger, it pays to believe them. They know; you don\u2019t. President Trump wasted two months downplaying the virus until his countrymen started dropping dead, and now the United States has the world\u2019s largest number of confirmed cases. The countries with the most success are those that acted early and decisively.\u00a0In China, the country where the pandemic began,\u00a0<\/span>the Communist government says the spread of infection is over. If you don’t like China, consider Hong Kong. It has civil rights and a free press, which makes it tougher for governments to lie.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Hong Kong reports\u00a0four<\/i>\u00a0deaths<\/i>\u00a0out of a population of 7.4 million.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>The Hong Kong people are packed together like bees, but they have holed up in their 480-square-foot apartments and have kept healthy. Part of it, no doubt, is that in Asia, people don\u2019t kiss each other on the cheek, as the Italians do, or hug each other, like the lovey-dovey Americans. (Are we going to keep doing that?) But a big part of it is that Hong Kong lived through the SARS epidemic of 17 years ago, and they learned what they had to do.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Shutdown works. Social distancing works.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Finally, on the Right comes a more respectable argument: that the disease may be bad but the cure will be worse. One of the readers responding to my previous post writes: \u201cMake no mistake about this, folks, a depression is a far greater tragedy than less than 1% of the folks dying from the coronavirus.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>He may be right. I hope not; a 10-year depression like the 1930s would be terrible. But you can\u2019t\u00a0assume<\/i>\u00a0that a government order shutting down the airline, recreation, restaurant, personal-services, and manufacturing industries for a few months is going to create such a depression, because no depression ever began that way. Maybe it would, but if you think so, make your case.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>A depression aside, to say, \u201cLet\u2019s let 1% of the people die,\u201d is callous. I\u2019m of an age and gender in which if I get this disease, I have a greater than 1% chance to be in that 1%. I\u2019m not going to buy into an argument that drops me dead. I am willing to go through a few weeks of inconvenience not to be infected by COVID-19, and to support state-imposed inconvenience on you so that you do not spread it to me.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>For a while. Not indefinitely. The money just approved by Congress and President Trump is the tipoff that at some point, the \u201cnot worth it\u201d argument begins to ring true. The sum of $2.3 trillion is a hell of a lot of money \u2014 two Iraq wars\u2019 worth. I argued on this page that the government didn\u2019t need to blast out trillions of dollars, but it clearly intends to do so until the shutdown is over. The national debt was already $23 trillion (107% of GDP) and was costing interest payments of $600 billion a year. Those numbers now rise. If interest rates go up \u2014 and being practically at zero, where else can they go? \u2014 the burden of debt rises faster.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>The shutdown will end. Like a tourniquet, you can\u2019t leave it on. No economy can go month after month with all the productive people, or half of them, sitting at home producing nothing. At the moment it looks like we do this for the next six to eight weeks, but soon enough the shutdown needs to end\u00a0whether it defeats the coronavirus or not<\/i>. I\u2019m hopeful it will work: I note that officials in China imposed home quarantine on Wuhan on January 23, and they say they\u2019re going to\u00a0<\/span>lift the lockdown on April 8<\/span><\/a>. America got serious (<\/span>though not as serious as Asia<\/span><\/a>) early in March. If what we\u2019re doing is enough, by Memorial Day the epidemic should have subsided.<\/span><\/p>

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/i><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>A reader responded to this by complaining that I hadn’t been respectful of Lew Rockwell. I replied that the lack was intentional.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I turned this in to editor Steve Cox when the nationwide death toll from COVID-19 was 2,950. As I post this, in September 2020, it approaches 200,000. In most other countries the disease did subside by Memorial Day or soon after, but here it has continued, albeit with a lower death rate. The “shutdown” is\u00a0over\u00a0and people have gone back to work, but businesses \u00a0require customers to wear masks \u2014 and the Right still cries tyranny.<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 This is not my only complaint about Lew Rockwell. He has published an alarming number of pieces defending dictatorships. He published defenses of Russia’s Vladimir Putin by Patrick J. Buchanan on Dec. 18, 2013, by Neil Clark on Nov. 5, 2014, and by Paul Craig Roberts on Oct. 27, 2014, and March 2, 2018. Rockwell published defenses of the Orban government in Hungary by Linh Dinh on Feb. 20, 2016, and by Frank Furedi on May 28, 2020, and of the Lukashenko government in Belarus by Therry Meyssan on Sept. 2, 2020. I look at this list and I think, “What the hell?”<\/i><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Most annoying to me, because of my connection to Hong Kong, is Rockwell’s repeated\u00a0<\/span><\/i>(Nov. 19, 2019, Nov. 25, 2019)\u00a0<\/span>publishing of articles that portray the Hong Kong people’s fight against China as “a mere Western-instilled and instrumentalized plot.” (Pepe Escobar, LRC, Aug. 8, 2019.) This is crap that belongs in a Communist newspaper. Rockwell’s stated reason (June 1, 2020) for running it is to undercut the arguments for U.S. intervention. I agree with him that the U.S. government\u00a0<\/span>should keep out, but his contributors go way beyond that. They assert that hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong pepole have poured into the streets, again and again, on account of an American plot. Maybe there was an American plot; if there was, it doesn’t matter. Not even the U.S. government has the power to create such demonstrations. The Hong Kong people demonstrate because they choose to demonstrate. And China’s imposition of an internal security law in 2020 shows that they have a good reason.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

National Institutes of Health Poster, 2020 Many on the Right, including libertarians, brushed off the COVID-19 pandemic. It wasn’t real, it didn’t matter, it would go away, and the government’s push for distancing and masks was an invasion of personal rights. Some went further, saying the pandemic was a trumped-up reason to increase politicians’ power […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-907","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1561,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/907\/revisions\/1561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}