The “big lie” propaganda technique, a phrase coined by Adolf Hitler, purports to tell a lie so "colossal" that people simply wouldn’t believe the teller "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." You’ve doubtless seen the most famous adaptation of this, which may or may not have been said by former Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. It goes as follows:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Now today, we thankfully don’t have an all-powerful “State,” not yet anyway, but we do have what I’ll call the ‘System,’ a toxic mishmash of do-gooder Big Tech overlords, power-hungry ‘public servants,’ liberty-hating ‘health officials,’ and frightened corporations bullied into both submitting and forcing others to submit to this nonsense. And that ‘System,’ as it were, is most certainly busy repressing dissent in order to bolster its very own, albeit new, “Big Lie,” that “face masks work to stop the spread of COVID-19.”
Not a soul could have possibly predicted this eight months ago when established science laughed at the idea that a piece of cloth over people’s faces would somehow abate the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus. Everyone is aware of the extreme course-reversal our overlords took on forced public masking almost overnight. We’re supposed to believe they simply told us a "noble lie" to preserve masks for healthcare workers, but the problem for them is that back then they gave us solid reasons backed up by decades of science to make their case.
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“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask when you’re in the middle of an outbreak,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said back in March. “Wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often, there are unintended consequences; people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
Obviously, the good doctor eventually took an about-face on that advice, attributing it, apparently, to a national shortage of fabric capable of being turned into face coverings, or something. But what part of his initial rationale was incorrect? Did scientists not know about “droplets” in March? Apparently they did, considering Fauci addressed the issue in his statement. Did the “unintended consequences” he listed suddenly disappear as soon as mask use to “stop the spread” became a literal religious cult? Did people stop fiddling with their masks and touching their faces? Of course not. Given the amount of almost nonstop “fiddling” I see just in my own observations, it’s hard to imagine any real gain in the reduction of droplet transmission not being more than made up for by bacterial and viral surface spread.
With so many high-mask-compliance places now going into lockdown, does it not strike anyone as odd that the bold statements made by our overlords months ago - that 80+% mask compliance would end the pandemic, or at least severely curb it - are now being memory-holed? Remember when CDC Director Robert Redfield told us in July (and God knows how many other times), that mask-wearing would end this pandemic. I believe he may have even said that masks were a “vaccine,” although the memory-holing is fogging my own memory a bit.
Remember when Variety wrote in May about a “compelling new study” they claimed provided “fresh evidence for a simple solution to help us emerge from this nightmarish lockdown.” Their ‘solution’? “If 80% of Americans wore masks, COVID-19 infections would plummet.” Well, mask compliance is well, well above 80%. In fact, in the states that fine businesses for people not wearing masks in their facilities, boots on the ground tell me it’s pretty close to 100%. Yet, other than a few New England states where the virus just hasn’t hit yet, high mask compliance states aren’t really doing any better than low mask compliance ones, and are in many cases doing quite worse.
From Italy to France to Czechia to the United Kingdom to lockdown and mask-loving U.S. states like Illinois, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Michigan, and California, the virus is spreading like wildfire regardless of humans turning themselves and their societies into pretzels trying to avoid it. The data is right before the eyes of anyone who bothers to look, as the Mises Institute’s Tom Woods points out in this powerful video that YouTube felt obligated to suppress (you know, to protect the Big Lie). Mask mandates, no matter how strictly imposed and adhered to, are almost always eventually followed by tremendous spikes in the virus. And yet, the response from the powers-that-be is always, always, ALWAYS to MASK HARRDERRR!!! California, which has mandated masks statewide for months, decided to deal with a November spike in cases by extending their outdoor mask mandate, despite the fact that zero science says the virus spreads outdoors to any significant extent. Oh, and they’re also locking down, albeit without admitting that the masking has completely failed to curb the virus. Otherwise, why would they need to lock down? Yep, it’s just another one of those difficult-to-answer questions that only a Big Lie could even begin to answer.
Of course, when infection rates do come down, and they will, they will come down regardless of how high or low mask “compliance” is in an area, because that’s also what viruses do when a certain seroprevalence is reached (yes, there are problems with PCR tests, but the herd immunity threshold admittedly seems higher than what many of us initially thought). Except, the masks will then be given the “credit” in the high compliance areas, while the low compliance areas that also decrease will be ignored.
Whether they mean well or they just want to turn us all into faceless sheeple capable of obeying even the most absurd and destructive commands, the truth is, it takes a lie the size of Mount Everest to continually prop nonsense like this up and to keep people believing it despite what we all see in front of our eyes. It takes a "Big Lie."
Follow Scott on Twitter @SKMorefield, Parler @smorefield, and Facebook. Also, be sure to follow Scott’s COVID ‘Team Reality’ Twitter list, 165 (and counting) doctors, medical professionals, analysts, data hounds, media, and politicians unafraid to tell the truth about COVID-19.
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