NEVER FORGET: REPUBLICANS THINK OUR COVID STRATEGIES ARE FAKE AND WE SUPPORT THEM ONLY BECAUSE WE'RE TYRANTS

A journalist who works at the Southern Poverty Law Center is puzzled by Ron DeSantis's anti-public-health witch hunt:

In my line of work I see this nonsense all the time but — taking a step back — it’s a pretty crazy deep cut for the governor of the third most populous state pic.twitter.com/ERjUCCbciK

— jason wilson (@jason_a_w) December 14, 2022

But it's not crazy. Here's what you need to understand: The Republican base believes that all the established figures who mobilized to fight COVID are corrupt, and that liberals know this. Republicans think we've supported vaccine mandates, masking, and other COVID mitigation and prevention strategies only because we want to crush the public under our jackboot.

Here's a piece at Hot Air:

NYC recommends wearing masks outside

Wait -- does New York City want you to wear masks while strolling in the park? No, of course not.

Due to high levels of COVID-19, the flu and RSV, @NYCHealthCommr has issued a Health Advisory on mask wearing. New Yorkers are strongly urged to wear masks in public indoor settings and crowded outdoor settings.

Find a COVID-19 and flu vaccination site: https://t.co/G3OXTST9Ob pic.twitter.com/kBv1dDtWz6

— City of New York (@nycgov) December 12, 2022

The city is recommending -- but not requiring -- masks in indoor settings and crowded outdoor settings. It's New York. We have crowds. We have crowds that the average Hot Air reader living in an outer-ring exurb in Marjorie Taylor Greene's congressional district can't comprehend.

The author of the piece, David Strom, is livid:

At least it isn’t a mandate. At least not yet.

There won't be a mandate. There wasn't one last winter during the Omicron surge. I'm not sure Strom understands that. (Most right-wingers seem to believe that liberal America has been in a state of total lockdown for two and a half years.)

But will the madness never cease? Really? Have we really learned nothing?

Perhaps that is the wrong question.

No, it IS the wrong question, because none of the mandates and “suggestions” have had much to do with COVID anyway.

The mask mandates were never about protecting anybody’s health, but rather about forcing people to comply with absurdities.

This is what they believe: that we know better, and we do these things because we love tyranny.

The mandates got people used to both the idea of complying with ridiculous requirements imposed by bureaucrats and–this is important–directing a “2-minutes hate” at those who refused to be bullied into submission.

The Left needs us to be in a permanent state of near panic in order to push through their insane agenda.

But what agenda have we pushed through? The Supreme Court still has nine justices. Build Back Better needed to be drastically shrunk in order to pass. Student loan relief is on hold. Abortion is illegal in more than a dozen states. The national minimum wage still hasn't gone up since 2009. Just about any sociopath in America can still buy an AR-15.

The great thing about masks ... is that everybody knows you are compliant. They can literally see it on your face.

Social pressure can be maximized. The mask is a display of fealty, not a medical tool. Getting you to wear it is a victory for the Left....

It will be interesting to see how many New Yorkers will comply with this “recommendation.” I suspect it will be relatively few, even in deep Blue NYC.

So it's a "recommendation," in scare quotes, which means that Strom thinks it's really a mandate, and "social pressure can be maximized" -- and yet Strom thinks New Yorkers won't comply. If that's tyranny, we're not very good at it.

Here's what I don't get: If we see every public health problem as an excuse to deprive the citizenry of their freedom, why didn't we do this during SARS? Or Ebola in 2014? Or the rise in monkeypox earlier this year? Or any bad flu year? Right-wingers love quoting Rahm Emanuel's saying "Never let a crisis go to waste." We let all those crises go to waste! We're inept tyrants!

If I am correct it will be an obvious indicator of the limits that exist for the people pushing the more radical policies being pushed by the transnational Elites, such as converting from meat eaters to bug eaters.

If you don't lurk in right-wing spaces, you have no idea how obsessed they are with the notion that we want to force them to eat insects.

It may be...I hope it actually is...the case that the World Economic Forum/Davos agenda is running up against its limits.

World Economic Forum! Drink! Well, it's true that the WEF has recommended eating insects as a way to fight climate change. But no one's actually doing it.

The masking is a test of your willingness to accept absurd demands, nothing more. Don’t comply. They don’t work, and not doing so sends a message to the elite and to everybody who meekly follows their lead.

"Meekly" is the tell here. Right-wingers talk as if we're tyrants of a particularly brutal kind, but then they portray anyone who complies with our demands as meek little sheeple -- not like them. They're the brave resisters.

And that's the mindset that makes this Ron DeSantis crusade against the medical establishment politcally potent. DeSantis isn't playing a "deep cut" -- he's playing one of the right's favorite hits. It's evil, but it's smart politics.