The Wuhan Virus Pandemic has Exposed the American Ruling Class

 

By Steve McCann
AmericanThinker.com

At the culmination of a national health or societal crisis in the United States, it has become de rigueur for the media and innumerable pundits ensconced within the professional class to perform a post-mortem on how the citizenry handled the crisis and what lessons the rubes in fly-over country should have learned. But in the current pandemic, the top levels of professional class that populates the ruling class and runs the media and the major institutional bureaucracies has irretrievably unmasked itself. And the in the postmortems that will come, they will be found deficient.

Credulous Cowards

An immutable tenet of today’s ruling class is that if someone or an institution within their power base is labeled as “experts,” then these authorities are not to be questioned and their assumptions, predictions or projections must be treated as gospel. The century that followed the rise of the Wilsonian progressives, who idolized a powerful government run by educated experts, saw enormous scientific, medical, and industrial achievements the hands of experts, the products of higher education. The professional class, usually products of higher education, grants deference to certified experts, and the media makes celebrities out of those experts that support important goals of the ruling class. Experts have had a very good century.

Life is better when you're an approved expert

In the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, the World Health Organization, a darling of the American elites, claimed China was successfully mitigating the spread and the virus was not spread by human to human contact.  Other experts, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, claimed the virus was not a serious threat.  These proclamations were believed without question by the ruling class as is borne out at the time by their public statements, published articles and mocking of President Trump for taking the threat far more seriously than any of the nation’s elites.

However, on March 16, an even higher echelon of experts, the Imperial College in London, came out with a study projecting 2.2 million Americans would die if no mitigation took place or 1.1 million if an unprecedented societal shutdown were imposed. This immediately became the new mantra and the media arm of the ruling class was dispatched to spread this apocalyptic message far and wide and to now vilify President Trump for not doing enough soon enough.

Within 10 days, however, the Imperial College walked back their doomsday scenario reducing the fatality estimates by over 90%.   Nonetheless, thanks to our media class, mass hysteria was consuming the nation, so more experts were needed to keep up the drumbeat of fear and trepidation.

Enter the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation on March 25, predicting a meltdown of the nation’s health care system due to an enormous shortage of hospital and ICU beds throughout the nation, as well as up to 162,000 deaths. The immediate necessity of a societal lockdown, regardless of the economic or human cost, was thus cast in stone.  Since that original study, the IHME has revised their study three times reducing their projected death toll by 60% and downgrading the need for hospital and ICU beds by more than 80%. 

During this entire period of time, the nation’s elites never questioned or highlighted the errors of either the experts who claimed that the virus was under control and not a major concern or those and their projections which were used to shut down the nation and cast untold millions into unemployment and unbelievable distress.  By mid-March, their media arm had created such a groundswell for a national lockdown that any countervailing studies by numerous non-preferred but eminent doctors and scientists in the United States and around the world were ignored and their research not permitted to see the light of day.

One must conclude, therefore, that the ruling class is too credulous to question any of their annointed experts and too cowardly to ever admit their own errors  in judgment.

The Ruling Class Exhibits Totalitarian Tendencies

Conservatives have cast a jaundiced eye toward the principal political arm of the ruling class, the Democrat Party, for many years, believing the leadership and elected cohort to be closet totalitarians.  As the coronavirus lockdowns spread from state to state, the party, its elected officials and its propaganda arm, the mainstream media, unabashedly emerged from that closet, along with a few Republicans.

Wannabe autocrats surfaced in New Jersey, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania, California and 25 other states, issuing contradictory and often illegal orders and proclamations under the threat of jail or severe fines.  Virtually all these unilateral proclamations, without benefit of any legislative or judicial action, drastically curtailed essential civil rights. 

The Governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, was asked by Tucker Carlson by what authority did he have to nullify the Bill of Rights in issuing an order that resulted in 15 people being arrested for congregating in a synagogue.  His response: “I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this…we looked at all the data and science and it says people have to stay away from each other.” Murphy is a member in good standing of the ruling class and their deference to preferred “experts” and not the Constitution.

It was not just governors and mayors on the state and local level.  Others such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the entire hierarchy of the Democrat Party, the mainstream media and the coastal elites supported and applauded these actions.  Further, this same cabal publicly proclaimed this crisis was the ideal opportunity to force their long wished for socialist agenda on the nation.

The façade of moderation the ruling elites built over the years is no more.  They have exposed themselves for who they really are: totalitarians.  If they were ever to control all the levers of power, they would never willingly surrender them.

Americans Now Know the Ruling Class Sold the Nation Out to China

While the American public has long been suspicious of Chinese influence in America, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed for all to see the extent of this nation’s reliance on a global adversary for necessities such as medical and pharmaceutical products.  And that the single-minded pursuit of wealth and power prompted the American ruling class to proclaim over the years that it was a great benefit for the United States to empower China.

China owes its faster than expected rise as a world power to the transfer of American jobs, technology, capital, and business acumen to China so that US shareholders could receive capital gains, US executives could receive incentive pay for producing consumer products at a much lower labor cost, and the nation’s elites could, using riches from Chinese investments in the US, consolidate their retention of power.

Apparently, the American ruling class could not comprehend that if US corporations produce the goods they market to Americans offshore, it is the offshore countries that benefit the most from the economic activity.  If that location is an authoritarian regime bent on world domination, then they will use their newfound wealth to build up their military, exploit and suppress their citizenry, promote manufacturing dependence, and corrupt the governing classes of their potential adversaries.

And a substantial segment of the American ruling class has been corrupted by the Chinese Communists.  (Investigative reporter Lee Smith has an excellent analysis of how this corruption evolved at TabletMag.com.)  These sympathizers are presently defending China by unabashedly regurgitating Chinese propaganda about who was responsible for the Wuhan Virus, how it was spread and by refusing to acknowledge that the globalist philosophy of dependence on potential foreign adversaries for manufactured goods was a mistake.

The coronavirus crisis has revealed to an increasingly larger percentage of the populace the extent to which they were sold out by a now compromised ruling class.

The Ruling Class Cares Only About Itself Not the American People

From mid-January to the present, the reaction of the nation’s elites to the Wuhan Virus pandemic has been almost solely based their intense hatred of President Trump.  In January and February, among a number of other steps, Donald Trump imposed a travel ban on Chinese nationals and quarantined those Americans returning to the United States from the Wuhan area.  At the time, he was pilloried as a xenophobe who was overreacting.  Now the President is savagely maligned for not doing enough in January and February.

During the month of March, hyping extraordinarily flawed studies, the media by constant fearmongering stampeded the general public into demanding action from the administration.  A partial shutdown was proposed which gave license to the wannabe dictators in various states to impose near martial law.  In just four weeks nearly 30 million have lost their jobs, the economy is in tatters and the national debt, due to relief and stimulus spending, will balloon by over $6 trillion (the total national debt in 2002: $6.2 trillion).

The original purpose of the shutdown was to “flatten the curve” and slow the spread. Which has been accomplished.  The time has come to reopen the economy.  Except many of the denizens of the ruling class insist on moving the goalposts and setting targets that can never be met before the country reopens. They are insisting on universal testing (an impossibility) and a vaccine (which will take up to 18 months) before the nation can get back to work.  In other words, a guaranteed safe world -- there can be no more outbreaks and deaths from the virus.  They intend to hold President Trump politically responsible for a reopening that in any way fails to meet these unattainable metrics.

The fate of untold millions of Americans mired in an economic and societal depression is immaterial as long as the economy and the nation are in shambles come November 3, 2020.  The people be damned as long as Donald Trump and his populist movement, the most serious threat the ruling class has ever faced, are permanently defeated.

This nation has survived wars, depression and seven global pandemics yet the Wuhan Virus has revealed that the current American Ruling Class is most serious long-term threat to this nation in its 244-year history.