The "New Normal" Continues To Collapse

If Los Angeles is a bellwether, the "new normal" has gotten old. Last year, we were hearing that masks and social distance were going to be around forever. For instance, from the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners:

The coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives in many ways. Among them is the "new normal" of wearing face masks around others for protection and to prevent the spread of the disease. This June, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez signed an Executive Order requiring the use of facial coverings in public. Following guidelines from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the order calls for the use of any facial covering that snugly covers the face and mouth, whether store-bought or homemade, and secured with ties or ear loops. Mayor Gimenez and County Commissioners have asked residents not use N95-rated masks, since these were critical supplies for health care workers, police, fire, emergency management, or other people engaged in life safety activities. They also noted that face masks are not a substitute for maintaining a safe distance.

In LA, the safe-distance stickers on the sidewalks and calibrations on supermarket floors have largely succumbed to the power washers. And following on LA County's "pause" in its threat to reimpose indoor masking,

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has conceded to public and parental opposition and announced Tuesday that it will not demand that students be vaccinated this fall, nor that they wear masks or that they provide coronavirus tests.

This seems to have been the result of intense back-channel pressure that hasn't received much publicity, but it's clearly been effective. A requirement for frequent home testing seems to have been a fallback strategy mooted by public health authorities in the wake of mounting evidence that vaccines neither prevent transmission nor assure immunity, but their steady loss of credibility as each new solution proves ineffective and the disease itself grows harmless pushes their exhortations into mere background noise -- and they're beginning to recognize this themselves.

I keep thinking back to the Hillsdale College paper from last November that I first linked the other day, What Is the Great Reset? by Michael Rechtenwald, in which he argues that to the Davos elites in 2020,

COVID represents an “opportunity [that] can be seized”; that “we should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world”; that “the moment must be seized to take advantage of this unique window of opportunity". . .

In other words, COVID was going to be the portal, or at least the excuse, for imposing a new set of human principles, although the overwhelming impression I get from Rechtenwald's review is that they were inchoate and unserious (Marx and Lenin, in contrast, were serious guys. Those Davos types are nowhere near in their league):

The draconian lockdown measures employed by Western governments managed to accomplish goals of which corporate socialists in the WEF could only dream—above all, the destruction of small businesses, eliminating competitors for corporate monopolists favored by the state.

. . . Other developments that advance the Great Reset agenda have included unfettered immigration, travel restrictions for otherwise legal border crossing, the Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money and the subsequent inflation, increased taxation, increased dependence on the state, broken supply chains, the restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect of personal carbon allowances.

Such policies reflect the “fairness” aspect of the Great Reset—fairness requires lowering the economic status of people in wealthier nations like the U.S. relative to that of people in poorer regions of the world. One of the functions of woke ideology is to make the majority in developed countries feel guilty about their wealth, which the elites aim to reset downwards—except, one notices, for the elites themselves, who need to be rich in order to fly in their private jets to Davos each year.

. . . As if the economic and governmental resets were not dramatic enough, the technological reset reads like a dystopian science fiction novel. It is based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution—or 4-IR for short. The first, second, and third industrial revolutions were the mechanical, electrical, and digital revolutions. The 4-IR marks the convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

. . . There is nothing original about this. Transhumanists and Singularitarians (prophets of technological singularity) such as Ray Kurzweil forecasted these and other revolutionary developments long ago. What’s different about the globalists’ vision of 4-IR is the attempt to harness it to the ends of the Great Reset.

Wait a moment. Ray Kurzweil is a nut. Even transhumanists like Glenn Reynolds have begun to recognize this in recent years and have stopped hyping Kurzweil and other crazies like Aubrey de Grey on their blogs. I can accept that members of the Davos clique cozened and flattered nerdy public health mavens into thinkng they'd be the vanguard who'd bring on the Age of Aquarius, but this didn't mean any of these people had a clue. If this was their plan, it worked like the schemes cooked up by Wile E Coyote.

They had a pandemic. They got the media to feature public health talking heads to show us the scary expanding circles and the predictions of imminent mass graves in public parks, the field hospitals, the hospital ships in New York and Los Angeles harbors -- remember those? They all packed up and went home for lack of business within weeks, but even if the lockdowns continued, fewer and fewer people were buying in.

But that was fine, more or less. They came up with a hero, Dr Fauci, a caudillo who'd lead us from darkness into light (and by the way up from Trumpism). As the Davos types wished, he'd suspend the economy, close the bars, barber shops, hair and nail salons, gyms, and churches. The plebs might not like it, but they'd have no choice, and masks would be the mark of their assent. And although even Dr Fauci knew an N95 was they only kind of mask that worked, as the proclamation from the Miami-Dade authorities above specified, N95s were specifically not to be used, just anything else, "store-bought or homemade".

Fauci himself showed the weakness of the plan. Short, unprepossessing, and gauche, he wasn't the kind of leader who could inspire sacrifice, and worse, neither he nor his sidekick Dr Birx was able to avoid hypocritical slips that made it clear they themselves had no intention of making the sacrifices they urged on the public at large.

And while they were able to use the COVID panic to winkle their main enemy Trump out of the US presidency, the team that replaced him was much more of a piece with Fauci and Birx, all of them people who in the course of that year's events managed to rise to their levels of incompetence -- Biden, Harris, and Pelosi. In hindsight, these people were never going to bring a Great Reset. You don't get figs from thistles or grapes from thornbushes.

The US population has proven remarkably resilient in the face of this crisis, which is what I expected when I started this blog. I've thought all along that the solution to this amateurish attempt at a Great Reset wouldn't be quick, but executed via the courts, the political process, and free expression, it would gradually be effective. So far, I've been right.