Tom Woods on the insanity of 2020

I have no idea what is going to happen in the world even in the near future, much less ten years from now. Imagine being at a point where you positively long for Bill Clinton, and that's where we are now. 

We turn on the TV (mistake #1) and a reporter is seriously telling us that protests are "mostly peaceful" while buildings burn directly behind him, on camera. If you and I protested something and one of our signs had a misplaced semicolon, the news would breathlessly report on the rise of fascism in America.

Just the other day the President Tweeted something clearly true: we don't shut the country down for the flu. We learn to live with it, in exactly the same way that we will obviously have to learn to live with COVID. We can't shut down all of society in a monomaniacal battle against one thing. There will be horrific consequences. At the very least, that's an eminently defensible view, and one held by some of the best scientific minds in the world. Twitter attached a statement saying that this is ordinarily the kind of Tweet they'd remove, but that in the public interest they're keeping it up. 

Today a senior writer with the Washington Post tried to debunk the claim that for some groups the flu is more deadly than COVID -- but in order to do so he had to use CFR figures for one and IFR figures for the other. This is a top person at one of our top newspapers. 

NPR just ran an item on how dangerous schools are, even though every bit of data we have, from all over the world, tells us the exact opposite. 

Three months ago, Washington, D.C., reached numbers indicating that it should have been at phase 3 of reopening, but it's still in lockdown limbo, indefinitely. 

They told us 15 days to slow the spread. It's day 205. They said we could have our lives back when we got a vaccine -- as if that were a guarantee. Now they're saying we can't have our lives back even with a vaccine. 

Joe Biden -- the man leading in the polls -- promises more of the same. Lockdown forever. Your countrymen are begging to have their life savings depleted and be confined to their homes -- or at least that's what the poll numbers seem to suggest. 

To call this insanity wouldn't come close to the scope of what's happening here.

Tom Woods, October 7, 2020