A major reason faith and trust was lost in the COVID pronouncements of media and public health experts was how brazenly they politicized their directives.
Quibble with some of the examples in this great thread but the message was clear: protests were allowed only if liberal.
(And, to be clear, I've never been anti-mask. I've always worn masks outside the house and still do because that's the law in Brazil, where vaccines still aren't available to all adults. But CDC guidance is important because it fosters a return to normal life: vital for health).
Everyone saw what happened: for months, we were bombarded with decrees that it was a moral duty to stay home, that anyone who went outside - even to deserted beaches - was killing grandma. When *mass* BLM protests erupted, the message instantly reversed:
It happened over & over. Any gatherings outside for any reason other than liberal political activities were scorned as homicidal and immoral. All other packed gatherings - BLM street protests, post-election Biden street parties, etc. - were glorified. Of course people lost trust.
The abusive treatment of 1/6 defendants -- imprisoned before trial in solitary -- is largely ignored due to fear of being accused of sympathizing with them if you object:
Just as neocons accused those who objected to the abuses of the 1st War on Terror of sympathy for Al Qaeda.
The ACLU -- when asked by @KerryPicket of the @dcexaminer -- agreed that the pre-trial conditions of imprisonment for the January 6 defendants were abusive and unjust:
Meanwhile, numerous GOP members of the House and Senate -- elected to represent Americans and govern the US -- have been obsessing on "fixing" Cuba while ignoring domestic abuses, leading to right-wing satire like this:
Really worth reading this NYT op-ed about COVID, vaccines and masks from @aaronecarroll. As he points out, it was always known there'd be breakthrough infections with the vaccines. The goal was to render it less harmful. That's working. Nothing changed.
There are some who insist nobody question the decrees of Govt agencies (though that only applies when they hear what they want: they maligned CDC's May lifting of its no-mask policy).
But given how quickly and and radically these messages shift, it's rational to question them.
When even authority-revering CNN is starting to notice and say that the CDC's manic shifts in guidance don't seem to make sense and should be questioned -- or at least aren't being communicated clearly -- you know there's a problem:
Acting as if 1/6 was some sort of serious "insurrection" is just pitiful.
None of the defendants has been charged with sedition, fomenting insurrection, attempted murder or anything like that. Because it wasn't that. It was a protest that turned into a 3-hour riot.
2 of the 4 people who died on 1/6 were Trump supporters who dropped dead of heart attacks.
Another was a Trump supporter who died of a speed overdose.
The 4th was an unarmed Trump supporter shot point blank in the neck and killed by a still-unknown armed agent of the state.
These are staggering new poll numbers from @USATODAY on the views of Detroit residents on issues of crime and policing, and constitute yet more evidence of how wide the gap is between the discourse of media elites on these questions and everyone else:
"Amid a jump in violent crime in this and other cities nationwide, Detroit residents report being much more worried about public safety than about police misconduct....
By an overwhelming 9-1, they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer."
Black residents in Detroit care much more about stopping violent crime than they do reforming the police. White residents care more about reforming the police by a small margin.
Who is most victimized by crime and who isn't is a huge factor in the discourse on these issues.
Questioning the FBI's role in 1/6 was maligned by corporate media as deranged. But only ignorance or a desire to deceive could produce such a reaction.
To keep fear levels high and the US security state's powers and budgets even higher, FBI has been doing this for decades.
A top FBI official has *admitted* in a little-noticed comment -- part of a documentary about an FBI attempt to entrap "terrorists" in 2009 -- that the FBI needs constant terror threats and plots to keep fear levels high and its own power unquestioned. Look:
108 murders in DC in the first six months of 2021, and they're almost all ignored. One shooting happens in an upscale NW DC neighborhood that CNN and HuffPost journalists love and it's a national news story.
Imagine how vastly different the national media discourse about violent crime and policing would be if that violence were occurring in the wealthier neighborhoods where media elites live instead of primarily victimizing the people who are invisible in media coverage.
Just as a reminder, one year ago, @lhfang was widely and disgustingly vilified as a racist by literally thousands of journalists on Twitter for the crime of interviewing various BLM protesters about crime and posting the videos, one of which was this one: