It began reasonably enough: Shelter at home so as to not overwhelm medical facilities that were anticipating receiving as many patients as early model numbers had shown: in the hundreds of thousands. People complied. They stopped going to work, with many telecommuting from home. They closed their schools. High school seniors and collegians gave up their most defining year, and kids everywhere gave up all of their friends. Small business owners nervously closed their shops and warehouses, things they sacrificed everything to build, an employment that grew to feed more families than just their own. People were promised checks to sustain them in exchange for their stolen livelihoods, but then Democrats blocked any additional funding leaving many small business out in the cold after NPR, Harvard, and the well-endowed Kennedy Center got their cut first.

I’ve received hundreds of emails from such small business owners across the country. Yes, they’re worried about protecting lives against the ravages of a virus but they’re also worried about protecting their ability to themselves survive the ravages of an economic shutdown. As I’ve discussed these past weeks on air, the government enacted a financial eminent domain, seizing from people their right of engaging in commerce and earning a living. The guidelines on social distancing and isolation were to be just that: guidelines, but some elected officials were determined to enforce these laws more severely upon innocent citizens than the punishment given by juries to convicted prisoners — one group was released, the other arrested and cited for merely doing something like paddle boarding alone. Last week when the first Michigan protests began, I explained how people weren’t protesting the stay-at-home orders — with which many voluntarily complied out of good stewardship of others — they were protesting the unjustifiable overreach of lawmakers like Governor Whitmer. Governor Blackface of Virginia used the pandemic opportunity to sign into law reductions of due process (red flag laws) and other anti-Second Amendment restrictions. In Montana they attempted to force everyone to wear wristbands to show permission to shop. A dad was arrested for playing ball with his kid.

This is why people are in the streets. They’re protesting overreach. These protests are being purposefully conflated as a way to shame the rejection of expanded government authority.

Instead of the free press working on behalf of the free people it claims to serve — by questioning elected officials as to the severity of lockdown orders that arbitrarily ban certain activities — they act as attack dogs on behalf of the people they’re supposed to question. Example: one reporter admitted to misleading Americans about the real number of beachgoers while defending “perspective.”

Via News4Jax:

Eight photos taken during approximately the same time and near the same stretch of sand demonstrate how beaches can appear crowded in one image while a picture of the same scene, captured with a different camera, makes the crowds appear thinner and more spaced out.

Including these shots provides clearer context but doesn’t serve the narrative that reddish-state Florida is on a suicide mission with throngs of beachgoers eager to yeet themselves into the oncoming path of a pandemic. In fact, the other photos above show people simply congregating on the beach within the guidelines of social distancing. Presenting this dishonestly as a way to justify extending the economic shutdown isn’t journalism, it’s propaganda.

When legacy media isn’t parroting communist China’s propaganda they’re castigating Americans for not submitting to overzealous officials. Any critique of this practice is hailed as a threat to the freedom of the “free press.”

Whose side is the press on?

 

I discussed all of this on today’s show: