Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, discussed the latest surge in Wuhan coronavirus cases in the United States on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and said one major takeaway is that state authorities have no good answers for the public.
Out of the need to do something, they are resorting to lockdowns, noting that European nations are taking the same route. In reality, they are not presenting a cost-benefit analysis to citizens that would take an honest look at the death rate and the problems that would arise from more lockdowns, such as substance abuse, domestic abuse, pauses in education, and missed health procedures.
“I’m afraid they’re going to have massive civil disobedience because for them to have credibility … they cannot be hypocritical,” Hanson said.
“They have to be disinterested. But think of a marquee official, a [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi, a [California] Gov. [Gavin] Newsom, a [Michigan] Gov. [Gretchen] Whitmer. All of these people have violated their own edicts,” he added.
"They go to hair dressers, they put their kids in private schools…they go to restaurants, so they are asking the public to obey edicts that they don’t feel apply to themselves and when you apply that to protest, all summer, Tucker, we saw people out in the streets, no social distancing, no mask, no cleanser, spraying and screaming,” Hanson noted. “And we even had health professionals who signed a letter who said it’s more deleterious to the health of certain groups not to protest than to risk the virus.”
To top it off, when the media declared victory for Joe Biden and people threw health precautions out the window, “nobody said a word.”
Just days later, however, you had political leaders “say we are going to go into the inner sanctum of a person’s home — so much for your home as a castle — and we are going to start monitoring your behavior in a way we surely didn’t when you attacked state property out in the street in Portland.”
For these reasons, Hanson believes political leaders will not see much compliance with more strict edicts.
He called it a “slippery slope” that if they can come into a person’s house to enforce a mask mandate, there’s no stopping them from asking intrusive health questions.
“Once you start dictating what a person can do inside the confines of their own home and you’re not consistent and you’re ideological, then you’re not going to have widespread compliance,” he said.