What to make of what is going on – which is going very fast in a very ugly direction?

It’s all too convenient. Two weeks ago, Orange Man seemed and probably was electorally invincible. Nothing his NPC opponents tried worked. The Orange Man ridiculed them, publicly, in his Orange Man way – leaving them bug-eyed with exasperation. One is reminded of people in the ’30s who could only refer to FDR as that man in between gasps of hate.

The “climate crisis” wasn’t selling, chiefly on account of lack of evidence, the lack made up for by an abundance of emotional rhetoric. Its purveyors had been reduced to desperation tactics such as shoving an emotionally damaged teenaged girl on stage whom they figured (correctly) few would openly criticize because she is a damaged teenage girl. But refraining from openly challenging a challenged little girl is not the same as believing what she says.

There there, sweetheart; it’ll all be okay.

The EV thing – which was tied to the climate thing – was about to topple like a Jenga tower due to the end of federal subsidies that had accounted for almost all EV “sales” so far – and because of the supply of inexpensive gas, something else the Orange Man caused to be.

Fold into this a growing public comprehension of the limitations of EVs and the massive commitment of the entire car industry to the manufacture of EVs, with the realization that the money spent would never be recouped.

It is doubtful that the government could have gotten away with bailing out Tesla or the other car makers over the failure of electric cars. But what if the entire car industry fails for another reason?

“Reasonable gun control” laws – including the extremely unreasonable ones proposed in states like Virginia – had been encountering very public pushback, leading to the withdrawal or watering down of such “reasonable” proposals.

People were waking up to the machinations of the digital Thought Police – the big tech companies who not only don’t like differences of opinion but have been using their effective monopoly on the means of modern communication to suppress it by “de-platforming” and “de-monetizing” differences of opinion (and of fact). Resentment of this had been increasing and an OM victory in November would have emboldened resistance even more.

03-18-20_EP_on KMED

The virus solves all these problems. The hysteria about the virus, that is. People are more panicked now than they were on September 12, 2011 – and more receptive to police state measures after 20 years, almost, of submission training.

It is all possibly coincidental – but I tend to be suspicious of those.

At any rate, there is a difference between getting sick – and getting dead. My friend Tom Woods forwarded an interesting- because not hysteric – piece (see here) by Richard Epstein of the Hoover Institution, which is associated with Stanford University.

There have been apparently about 150 deaths attributed to the virus in the U.S. so far. The bulk of them older people (many in their 80s and up) with underlying/additional health problems as well as bad habits, like smoking.

But even if it were all young, healthy people and several thousand of them, it needs to be put into context.

Approximately 35,000 people are killed in car accidents each year. No one suggests eliminating travel by car, much less the shutting down of the economy. Well, a few “Vision Zero” hysterics have suggested it – but they are not taken seriously precisely because of their hysteria.

The “experts” agree that the recovery rate for Corona is 95-97 percent, with the variable being the capacity of the health system to treat all at once a large number of sick people plus all the other people who need care for one reason or another. But the figure to hang onto is that 95-plus percent of the people who get this bug do not die from this bug.

But fear of death that isn’t likely to happen for the 95-plus percent of us is being used to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of us, by ruining us financially and rendering us dependent and desperate. Many of us may literally die from desperation, starvation and – possibly – the Mad Max violence that is certain to erupt over the next several weeks and months as millions of people realize their lives are over – and then the government violence which will be used to “contain” their desperation and rage.

It will then be very easy to enact – to decree – “reasonable” restrictions on many more things than just guns. Perhaps we will be ordered to “shelter in place” and told our only access to the necessities – food and so on – will be via the electronic Dickensian system of appealing to Amazon – owned by a technocrat multi-billionaire – who will provide so long as we comply.

Please sir, may I have some more.

The entire population reduced to financial serfdom, a state of arrested development and limitless control in the name of an “emergency” that seems tailor-made (and tailor marketed) to achieve what all the previous efforts failed to achieve.

It’s all too coincidental for me – a journalist of 30 years experience in detecting the odor of a rat – to not be suspicious. I remember a 40 story office building neatly collapsing almost straight down, as if someone had pulled the rug out from under it. I remember “WMD.” Perhaps you do, too.

I remember many other such things.

My prayer is that it is not too late. That – as bodies fail to stack up over the next two weeks or so – people will begin to suspect they’re being played. Again.

And if the bodies don’t – and if they do suspect – there will be another kind of Hell to pay.

What is occurring is either a product of justified crisis, insane stupidity – or evil almost beyond imagining.

We will know which soon enough.

. . .

Got a question about cars, Libertarian politics – or anything else? Click on the “ask Eric” link and send ’em in!