From what I can see, “reopening the country safely” basically means: NOT restoring the Constitutional, individual rights to commerce and association, while pretending we did.

Hair salons with one customer at a time? Curbside service for buying clothes? Restaurants with only a couple of tables open, and no bar service? THIS IS NOT REOPENING. IT’S STAYING CLOSED AND CALLING IT REOPENING.

In the words of the late George Carlin: It’s all B.S., and it’s bad for you.

Increasingly, it’s clear: The only way this country will reopen is if people defiantly do so. I am talking mass civil disobedience. This means YOU and I, in our small towns and big cities or suburbs, acting like we’re still living in a free country. If we wait for the government’s approval, it simply will not happen.

If millions take the lead and restore sovereignty over their own lives, livelihood and liberties, then the worthless, parasitical weenie narcissists in our town halls and state capitals will have no choice but to submit.—Michael J. Hurd

I saw a leftist post that approvingly stated, “Wearing mask shows humility”. What they mean by humility is: Submission.

We can agree, at least, that these silly, homemade cloth masks are not about physical safety. They’re about a moral code which states: “My life does not belong to me. I do what I’m told. If it doesn’t make sense, that’s all the more reason to do it — if I’m ordered, and if it demonstrates humility”.

Do you still wonder how Nazi Germany happened? This is how. People abandoned their critical thinking. They replaced it with following orders and virtue-signaling for the sake of their neighbors … all of whom also virtue-signal.

Right now it’s masks and open-ended lockdowns. What will be next? Concentration camps? You think it’s crazy to suggest such a thing. But why? The authorities know many of us will follow any orders they hand out, without reason or independent thought. If they can get away with everything they got away with over the last two months, can’t they get away with anything? It’s all for your health, after all.

Other than the admirable protestors, I don’t see anyone willing to fight. To me, it’s disturbing. To our rulers, it’s empowering. They have noticed the lack of protest too. That’s why they keep doubling and tripling down on existing unconstitutional orders, and issuing new ones by the day.— Michael J Hurd.

THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE
Keeper of the Flame of the Enlightenment

Welcome to The Artful Dilettante–a sanctuary of reason and virtue, where reality is your best friend and facts always trump wishful thinking. It is the Lamp of Hope in a dark and musty corner of a crumbling civilization. It is the seedbed of the Republic of Letters and Virtue coming soon to a world near you. It is a place of free minds, free wills, and free markets–without chains, yokes, or harnesses. The Artful Dilettante is on the front lines of the Liberty Movement. It is intended for people who think rationally as a way of life. There is no place here for the false dichotomies of left and right, haves and have-nots, liberals and conservatives. History is and has always been about the struggle between liberty and power. The stale bromides and recycled political pablum advanced as solutions by our benighted leadership will find no support here. Great moral problems cannot be solved by sleights-of-hand. The true sign of a good idea is the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the ruling class. We are ever on the lookout for bold and sweeping ideas, firmly grounded in liberty, which will send the political class into fits of rage.

We always have our finger on the pulse at The Artful Dilettante. We are dispassionate, keenly perceptive, and yes, somewhat cynical observers of human events. We are at once above the din and in the fray. We have a nuanced understanding of our political system and the criminals and reprobates who run it. We never accept anything at face value, especially the pronouncements of those in power and the echoes of their dutiful, fawning bottom-dwellers in the media and university faculty lounges. We know that people often aren’t who they say they are, and that things aren’t always as they appear to be. We fully agree with the notion that there are no accidents in politics. We reflexively assume that every politician is either lying or stupid, and that the vast majority of the American people can be trusted with a deadly weapon but not the right to vote. We fully agree with the words of Jefferson: “The Tree of Liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are yours by birthright, not permission. They can be taken away, but never granted.

We promise never to be fair and balanced but to tell the unvarnished truth. Fair and balanced just means you’re telling the truth half the time. Remember, all you get when you straddle a fence is a sore ass. We promise to challenge the prevailing wisdom while honoring the universal, timeless truths of our forebears. Lastly, we promise to aggressively promote our vision of a just and peaceful society based on the application of reason to the challenges of life on earth.

The Artful Dilettante

My 24-year-old son has come up with a fabulous idea to resume spectator sports in our country. Before having your ticket scanned, every ticket holder has to submit to a rectal temperature reading. Every fan has to drop their pants and underwear, bend over and spread ’em, while an attendant takes your temperature. Men can get an optional prostate exam at same time by a board-certified urologist. Everybody in line gets to watch the process, optionally of course. If your temperature is within the normal range, you get your ticket scanned and proceed to the metal detector. And they say youth is wasted on the young.–The Artful Dilettante

As a therapist for over 30 years, I have met with, time & again, people who are doing well that suddenly self-destruct. Subconsciously, they don’t feel like they deserve their success. Or they feel like their lives have become meaningless. The self-destruction serves a purpose, to create a situation where they feel like they have a “cause” again, or a problem to solve. It’s a very big mistake and the negative consequences can be lasting, taking years to reverse.

It occurs to me that if an individual can do this, so can a society. Millions of us who want to thrive, prosper and be happy are now forced to live in the economic and social wreckage created by millions of others who would rather find some warped sense of meaning and purpose in a self-generated disaster, such as turning a troubling yet survivable virus into some kind of faux, overstated pandemic.

It’s unsettling, more than words can express, to wake up each day now in a world where millions of your fellow citizens are this disturbed and irrational. But they tolerate and even seem to welcome the destruction. So do their elected leaders. Sick. We have got to find a way to fight them, and save ourselves. Their psychopathology has ruined life for everyone, and we cannot let that continue.–Michael J. Hurd

Right now all of us have decisions to make about how much freedom is too much freedom.

On the national lockdown loosening in some states and stubbornly persisting in others, Americans are very much of two minds. For some, including most of the media, it is an inconvenience, but a righteous one that saves lives. For others, often with smaller megaphones, it is a powerfully destructive force economically and socially. But we should be able to agree that, whether justified or not, the lockdown has been a massive infringement on Americans’ basic rights.

At least since women received the right to vote there has been no time when so many Americans have had so many basic rights limited by the government. Yes, millions have been drafted, during World War II the entire country was made to ration goods, and there have been horrible incidents like Japanese internment. But never have the vast majority of Americans — hundreds of millions of people — had so many rights stripped for so extended a time with no end in sight.

Let’s look down the list of rights that are currently being denied by the state to the vast majority of Americans. Most may not leave their houses except for essential travel. Most may not operate their businesses. Most may not attend church or host even small gatherings in their homes. Most may not receive even potentially life-saving medical procedures such as cancer screenings. Whether one supports or opposes the lockdown, this deprivation of rights in unprecedented in modern American history.

America was founded on the principle that God gives us inalienable rights, specifically to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. State-imposed shutdowns of basic medical services threaten life. Restrictions on travel and what we may do in our homes threaten liberty. Banning all gatherings such as church, entertainment, social gatherings, and sports threatens happiness. The lockdown hits the trifecta.

Those in favor of the state-mandated restriction of rights argue that it is only temporary and is needed because of the grave medical emergency we face. Even though many, including Attorney General William Barr, have expressed serious doubts as to whether a pandemic supersedes the Constitution, let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that it does and see where this idea takes us.

The first thing to note is that this unprecedented attack on basic rights is open ended. Many believe that at least some of these restrictions must stay in place until the Chinese virus is no longer with us. This may never happen. Will “the new normal” be one in which we sacrifice freedom for safety? And if so, what is the limiting principle?

For that matter, what constitutes a public health crisis sufficiently deadly to “temporarily” suspend people’s rights? In 2017, about 40,000 people were killed in incidents involving guns. To date, about 70,000 people have died from coronavirus. These figures are not wildly different. If the state may take such drastic measures to deny Americans rights during the pandemic, why couldn’t tens of thousands of gun-related deaths qualify as a public health crisis that supersedes the Second Amendment and leads to gun confiscation? Where is the line between these causes of death?

What about free speech? Surely nobody would suggest that this most basic and precious liberty be a casualty of the Chinese pandemic — or would they? In The Atlantic, Jack Goldsmith and Adam Keane Woods have this to say” “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the [Internet] network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing Internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the Internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.” Yikes!

The longer this lockdown goes on, the more accustomed Americans become to a deprivation of their God-given rights by the state in the name of saving lives, and the flimsier the parchment of the Constitution becomes. Governments always have “good reasons” for denying rights. Nobody ever says, “I just want to be an awful fascist.” There’s always a threat, usually a very serious one, that supposedly justifies such illiberal actions.

Beyond the death, sickness, economic ruin, and inconvenience of this crisis, we must also be jealously guarding the rights protected by our founding. We do this not merely to defend the liberties that have been bequeathed to us, but protect them for those to whom we must pass them.

These are not esoteric, ivory tower constitutional questions; they literally strike at the birthright of every American. They must not be waived away under the pretense of an emergency situation. The government does not grant us rights, it protects them. Right now, all of us have decisions to make about how much freedom is too much freedom. On this question, we must never err on the side of caution, but always on the side of liberty.— David Marcus

In Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” the hero John Galt stopped the motor of the world by encouraging the men of the mind to go on strike. Innovators in business, science and the arts — one by one, he persuaded them to exit the world and create their own civilization in a hidden place. They withdrew their virtue and competence from the leftist, socialist, sacrifice-obsessed world who condemned and hampered them. It took years.

As the world deteriorated due to the withdrawal of talent, everyone thought it was a BAD thing. They couldn’t understand what had happened, and they generally blamed the wrong causes — “the government has got to DO SOMETHING about all this”, they screamed. The more the government intervened, the worse things got. But the point is: They all agreed it was a BAD thing.

Contrast that with what actually happened in 2020, for real. The world elites uttered one word: “Virus”. With grossly insufficient facts or reason to back them up, they ordered the entire world inside. Everyone complied. Immediately.

The magnificent world economy, centered in America … simply stopped. Two months later, everyone is still complying. Many are complying resentfully, and a minority protest; but the totalitarian regime people consented to remains in place and (I suspect) widely supported.

In most places, no end to the shutdown is in sight. A few places are turning a few of the lights back on, but they concede if there’s so much as a sneeze (or even the perception of a sneeze), the lights go back out. They have set their own trap for the fall, if not sooner. The media stands poised to say, “I told you so”, with or without facts.

Ask yourself which tale is more bizarre: Ayn Rand’s fictional dystopian novel written back in the 1950s; or what is actually going on right now.

There is no John Galt shutting down the motor of the world. The world has done this to itself. The elites and tyrants could not have done it without the consent of the people — in America, as well as the whole civilized Western world.

Rand warned us that the decline of reason/common sense and the triumph of socialistic altruism would bring us down, in the end. Unless we radically reversed course. Boy, was she right.

The victims of John Galt’s morally justified strike hated the results of the strike. They thought it was a BAD thing. The perpetrators and supporters of today’s world shutdown call it morally courageous and the essence of virtue. Let’s be honest: Even President Trump bought into it, albeit reluctantly. Giving up civilization for the sake of a tiny minority of sick people, most of whom won’t die? Why, that’s the ultimate sacrifice. How glorious! At least, if you think sacrifice is a good thing.

In her book, Rand condemned the idea that sacrifice is a virtue. That’s one reason why she was so controversial, and elites/intellectuals and other tyrants attacked her with a vitriolic hatred even most conservatives don’t normally endure. She warned such a toxic notion could lead the world to the events of Atlas Shrugged — or worse. What we have seen in the last two months is worse. If she were alive (she died in 1982), I believe she might agree.

We have shut down the motor of the world. We have triggered a great depression the likes of which the world has never seen, the full implications of which we can’t yet grasp. Who would have thought? In Rand’s novel, it took Galt years to shut down the world. He only wanted to do it to show people that they need reason, virtue, freedom and capitalism for everything to work. He didn’t do it to destroy life, but to preserve it.

Our real world’s inhabitants are, by and large, just as ignorant as the people who inhabited Rand’s fictitious world. But the amazing thing is: We did it for a virus. A virus that will only affect about 1 percent of us, and that will only kill a tiny fraction of those of us who get it. That’s ALL it took to shut down the motor of the world … in a matter of hours.

Ayn Rand herself could never have come up with such a plot. Nor could have Orwell, nor any other imaginative writer.

Hitler and Stalin killed millions. They were homicidal maniacs. They killed for the “glory” of sacrifice.

But the world depression caused by shutting down the economy may kill billions, not millions. The collapse of our economy in 2020 is like a fall from the top of the World Trade Center, rather than a fall from a twenty-floor building. It’s less a homicide than a suicide. Or, because millions of us do oppose and resent it, a murder-suicide: the greatest murder-suicide in all of recorded history.

Nothing short of a total uprising and revolution can save us now. The revolution has to be for individual rights, for rationality, and for freedom. It has to be on a Randian level, because — if it isn’t — we’re truly over.

In order for this to happen, people first have to come out from under their beds and face the sunlight. Will they? The outcome could be the stuff of a gigantic Rand novel. And we’re living it now.—Michael J. Hurd

Trump is getting roasted on Chinese Twitter for his virus comments.
‘Not the World’s Number One’: Chinese Social Media Piles On the U.S.
The verdict is in: China has outperformed, while the once-respected American system has collapsed

So there’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, this idea that Weibo, a Chinese social network is comparable to Twitter in America. Weibo is operated and monitored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To pretend that anything that appears there represents the true attitudes of the Chinese people would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous. It’s roughly the equivalent of a Nazi press conference in 1940 in which some Jews in Warsaw praise the efficiency of the German government with big smiles while guns are pointed at them.

Let’s bear in mind that China has a million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps, is crushing dissent in Hong Kong, disappears not only dissidents, but also doctors who defy orders in an attempt to stop a pandemic, and tracks the social behavior of every person under their murderous rule. Given all of this, is it possible, just maybe, that people in China don’t feel totally free to express their true opinions on CCP tracked social media?

Add to all of this that the Politico article blindly accepts Chinese facts and figures on their coronavirus response rate even though it is patently obvious that China has been lying about it for months. It’s a damning situation and one that needs its origins understood. How did we reach a place where a mainstream American outlet is literally pushing Chinese Communist Propaganda?

The answer to this question lies in a cultural relativism crafted by the left over the past few decades, which paralyzes them from criticizing other cultures even while they rip their own to shreds. After all, who are we to call out human rights abuses when we are destroying the planet, cultivating systemic racism, irresponsibly allowing gun ownership, interfering internationally in imperialist ways and culturally appropriating everyone’s outfits?

To see this at work, look no further than the Pulitzer Prize that the New York Times just received for its “1619 Project.” In this case, the problem with the project isn’t the giant cannon balls historians have blown through its flimsy fabric, but rather the intention of the project itself. It isn’t just that the Times is trying to center the American narrative around the horrible institution of slavery, but that it is actively trying to replace the concept of freedom as the primary motivating desire of the American experiment.

Once you do that, the stated goals and values of the founding of our country, which have certainly been poorly executed for much of our history, become essentially irrelevant. At that point it becomes results, not principles, that guide moral judgments regarding governments and cultures. That is exactly the foolhardy approach that Politico has taken in its naïve and troubling tweet and piece.

The normalization of totalitarian regimes in the name of social progress in the media is nothing new. In the 1920s and 1930s, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty served as a propagandist parroting Soviet talking points as millions were shipped to the Gulags. Oh, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Go figure.

As we enter what may become another Cold War with China it is useful to remember a few words from Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech that helped win the last one:

“I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

It is easy to put the excesses of the contemporary Left down to its deranged hatred of Donald Trump, but this badly misses the point. The seeds of these obsequious genuflections to communist China were sown long before the magic ride on the golden escalator. Just as the communists were given a pass for inhumanity in the twentieth century, now that same rationalization of relativism is being employed again.

The most effective way to fight communist China, our greatest geopolitical foe, is to embrace and understand what makes freedom better than tyranny, tolerance better than concentration camps, and free speech better than demands of praise for the Community Party. Happily, the New York Times and the past Politicos of the world lost the last Cold War and they will lose this one too.

On Sunday, Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force appeared on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace. Among the topics discussed were the recent protests at the Michigan state Capitol in which a glut of demonstrators gathered inside without face coverings.

What a typical globalist bureaucrat. She’s scared to death of people protesting without masks. She’s indifferent to the suffering, suicides, devastation, loss and social-economic wreckage created by her faulty medical propaganda. President Trump was wrong to associate with these people. The suffering and loss of life they contributed to will be documented for decades to come. Go to hell, Dr. Birx.–Michael J. Hurd

Research into COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all of our lives in unique ways. Our team has been adapting some of our work to be more responsive to the extraordinary times we are living in right now. One of our goals is to inform policymakers, stakeholders and the public about school choice programs and to better understand choice in the larger context of American K–12 education. That context has gone through a seismic shift during recent months.

In partnership with Morning Consult, we surveyed American K–12 school parents about how COVID-19, which we also refer to as “coronavirus,” has affected their lives and their children’s education.

These results are part of a new, larger polling project that we will launch soon: the EdChoice Public Opinion Tracker. This new dashboard will update the first week of each month (or quarter depending on surveyed population) with the results of a much broader public survey with questions not only on COVID-19 but also on K–12 education topics, such as schooling, testing, spending and school choice.

Many organizations are conducting and sharing surveys about the societal effects of the coronavirus pandemic; however, few have focused on how it’s affecting K–12. In a rapidly changing environment for decision-making and adaptation, we understand time is of the essence for more real-time, descriptive reporting.

Below are results for 13 questions based on our most recent survey, conducted April 10 and 11 among 510 parents of school-age children—part of a larger nationally representative sample of 2,201 adults.

For more information about our new ongoing project and methodology, please email Paul DiPerna at paul@edchoice.org.

Vice President of Research and Innovation, EdChoice
Paul DiPerna
Vice President of Research and Innovation, EdChoice
Paul DiPerna is the vice president of research and innovation for EdChoice. The organization has published more than 110 reports, papers and briefs during his time leading the research program. Paul is project leader for the EdChoice Public Opinion Tracker. He is a member of AAPOR, MAPOR and AEFP.

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