It’s Time For Jack’s “Believe It Or Not!” Vox Actually Published This Essay Three Days Ago!

believe-it-or-not 2

The article by German Lopez in Vox published on June 4 is more than just head exploding. It is clinical evidence of brain dysfunction or such deep cynicism and disrespect for readers that the author and editors should be under surveillance. I’m exaggerating only slightly.

Vox is an openly Leftist website founded by Ezra Klein, who pretended to be an ethical journalist at the Washington Post until his outrageous partisan bias became too obvious to deny. Since then it has become the kind of news and commentary source, like MSNBC, only taken seriously by those who want to hear a slanted, spun, openly partisan view of reality that jibes with their unalterable world view. Yet this thing is unbelievable even by that standard.

Over the past week, even the mainstream media has accepted the likelihood that its government, and particularly its health authorities led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, lied to the public repeatedly, hid evidence and covered up facts and documents throughout the pandemic, prime among those fact the likely origins of the Wuhan virus (you’ll never guess where it came from!) This was a betrayal of trust of epic and historic proportions. So what does Vox identify as America’s “biggest pandemic failure”?

We’re not more like China! Or Iran! We don’t automatically bow to government restrictions on our liberties. We don’t trust the experts to run our lives! Some excerpts:

“Whenever collective action is called for, Americans don’t do it — or, at the very least, don’t do it sufficiently. America is too politicized, fractured, and, above all, individualistic for a collective move to save it. …When the US writes its next pandemic playbook, it can’t ignore this reality. Going forward, tackling a pandemic or collective public health threat will require a more individualistic approach to public health — one more focused on clear guidance, risk communication, harm reduction, and making the safest choice the easiest…The research suggests collectivistic places handled at least some aspects of the pandemic better. But in a highly individualistic society like the US, maybe such approaches are simply unrealistic. After suffering one of the highest Covid-19 death tolls among developed nations and in the world, America may have to find its own individualized alternative….Many Americans did take Covid-19 seriously, social distancing and masking up as federal officials and experts asked them to. They have continued to do so, too, getting vaccines as soon as they were available. But with Covid-19, just a few people can spoil everything. A few people going out, gathering, and failing to wear masks can launch an outbreak across a community…This is a big thing that went wrong with America’s approach to Covid-19. Yes, most people wore masks at least sometimes, and a lot of people made some sacrifice to social distance in the past year. But many others, fueled by Trump’s downplaying of the virus and politics in general, rejected the precautions, describing them as violations of civil liberties. Meanwhile, calls for more collectivistic actions have gone nowhere. Lockdowns quickly proved to be unsustainable, with protests and Trump’s demands to “LIBERATE!” economies soon leading just about every state in the country to reopen too quickly and see a surge in Covid-19 cases. Mask mandates were adopted in most states, but not all. Places that did keep some restrictions, from social distancing to mask mandates, barely enforced them — cops weren’t going around breaking up a lot of house parties.…”

Read the whole thing if your stomach is empty, but that should be enough. This is a totalitarian talking, and one that either doesn’t realize how repulsive and anti-American his analysis is, or one who is confident that his readers dislike democratic society as much as he does. Let’s ignore the factual distortions and gaslighting (the U.S.’s death toll from the illness cannot be compared to other nations, since the CDC guidelines deliberately overcounted pandemic deaths while other countries of similar or greater size undercounted; states did not open up too soon, they should never have closed down; there is no mention anywhere of the huge demonstrations, protests and riots that observed no “social distancing” that the alleged health experts stillendorsed, etc.), and just concentrate on the delusional, frightening attitude the article represents:

  • Despite all the evidence, coming in an avalanche before the article was written, that there was every reason to distrust the government and its experts since they were making stuff up, ignoring their own advice, and generally incompetent, Americans are at fault because they didn’t fall into line and love Big Brother, saying, “Thank-you sir, may I have another?”
  • The “precautions,” like telling people they could not drive alone in their car except for “essential” travel and should wear masks during sex, were not irrationally  “described” as violations of civil liberties, they were violations of civil liberties. Also, in too many cases to list, idiotic.
  • “A lot of people made some sacrifice to social distance in the past year”???? Everybody in the country except the elected officials like Nancy Pelosi and the gang of dictatorial Democratic mayors and governors who had guaranteed jobs and income and defied their own edicts whenever it was convenient sacrificed. The economy crashed for everybody. Children’s education went to hell, or Zoom, which is the same thing. The arts, sports, social activities, and of course businesses—like mine—were crippled—and all based on stuttering guesswork and fakery by incompetents posing under the banner of “science.”

The conclusion of this despicable screed is that, damn it, Americans just don’t take orders, or at least not enough of them. “America is an individualistic nation, and a progressive administration alone can’t change that,” Vox tells us. “One way to fix these problems would be to try to make Americans more collectivistic.”

In other words, less American. Trust Big Brother. Give up individualism and liberty for “the greater good.” It gets to be a habit, you know, then you’ll get used to it.  It’s all for the best.

“We shouldn’t tolerate another 600,000 American deaths in the next pandemic,” Big Brother’s PR flack concludes. That’s one of those intellectually dishonest statements that lets you know someone is conning you. Recent estimates suggest that the pandemic fatalities have been overcounted by as much as 20%. Ok, 500,000. The majority of the victims were sick and or elderly. How many of those would have died soon anyway if China’s virus hadn’t intervened? Half? Let’s be conservative and say only another 20%. That’s 400,000.

How many of those deaths are a reasonable price to pay to preserve American values, liberties, and individualism?

Every damn one of them.


33 thoughts on “It’s Time For Jack’s “Believe It Or Not!” Vox Actually Published This Essay Three Days Ago!

  1. The only place in the world more individualistic than Texas is possibly Australia. You will note that when Australia attempted to confiscate firearms less than one 3rd actually the turned them in.. This does not bode well for a tyrannical government. My guess is that if the democrats continue on this course, as Steve says there will be blood in the streets.

    • You say Australia is more individualistic, but from what I’ve heard from Australians I know (anecdotal, yes), there just isn’t much uproar about the lockdowns major cities enter whenever a case or two gets reported. Many smugly worded comments about how Australian government cares about its people by locking down every time someone sneezes while Trump was purposely letting people die.

      There were a few gatherings in protest, but many were shut down before they could even start. And Facebook was able to bully the Australian government by temporarily taking down a health department group.

      Also, the fact that they let a national gun confiscation go through, while the government was running ads warning subjects to turn in their newly illegal firearms or get raped in prison doesn’t sound very individualistic to me.

      • I agree with Andrew. Australia has essentially locked down an entire continent. Aussies are a strange lot. Their economy seems to keep all of them wealthy and content. I guess they simply sell coal and condos to the Chinese. Nor do they work very hard, I guess because they don’t really have to. In any event, the Aussie (and New Zealand) reaction(s) to the disease have been completely over the top and irrational.

        • Our reaction to the disease here in New Zealand may be over the top but at least I can go anywhere without a mask no matter what size the crowd is, my parents in their rest home have no fear that anyone may carry in the Wuhan virus which may carry them off, and the children only missed a couple of months at school.

          • Would you happen to know the overall mortality rate of New Zealand as compared to earlier years? How about rates of attempted suicide? Reports of mental illnesses? Average wages? If the only metric one cares about is rate of Wuhan virus infection, then it would be easy to consider a response like New Zealand’s as effective.

            However, people are much more complex creatures. And the unprecedented suspension of civil liberties that have occured, especially in Anglophile countries where personal liberty is meant to be core to all citizens, is a very high price to pay. Given the information that we now know about the Wuhan virus, information that the public should have been informed about a year ago, information that was available if one managed to dig a little bit, is the price that many countries paid worth the world we have now?

            • New Zealand is the only country in the OECD to have fewer deaths than expected. Deaths from flu, road crashes and suicide were all down.
              The lock downs were of varying restrictions from the most severe, level 4 of 33 days, level 3 of 22 days and level 2 of 24 days, a total of 79 days. Even at the most restrictive in level 4 I went for a 16 km run every 2nd day and on weekends I went for walks along the beach which was the most crowded I had ever seen it as most other places were closed.
              There were also three other short lockdowns when people managed to enter the country with the virus mostly affecting Auckland.
              As for wages, the Government paid a subsidy if employers could prove a substantial reduction in income during lockdown.

  2. One guy featured by The BLaze questioned New Yorkers who were still wearing a mask even after being vaccinated and asked them why, They are the kinds of “Americans” Vox approves of.

    One woman replied, “It feels weird not to.” Another answered, “I just like it. I got used to it. I don’t mind wearing it.” Another woman replied that even though she’s vaccinated and outside, she feels compelled to stay masked up: “I feel like I have to wear it. I don’t know why, I just want to wear it.”Yet another woman said since her friends are still wearing masks she believes she ought to as well.”I feel like I won’t take off my mask until everybody does,” a different woman confessed.A man answered that “there’s just a lot of anxieties with taking the mask off, you know, for the first time … it’s like a social anxiety at this point.” Another said his desire was to “protect others, and there’s still a risk no matter what” and that continuing to wear a mask “sets a visual example.” He added that continuing to wear the mask is “a bit of a protest” and that “I shouldn’t be given the privilege to not wear a mask.”

    Finally, a woman who not only had COVID-19 and then was double vaccinated told Horowitz that her desire to continue wearing a mask stems from being “so infuriated with people who didn’t wear a mask the whole year. It’s like a display of ‘I still care.'”

    • My experience recently is like your 7-11 visit you mentioned yesterday. I went to Lowe’s yesterday because our microwave finally broke and my wife had to have a replacement immediately. I’m still seeing at least 60% of the people wearing masks and Lowe’s has removed their signs mandating masks. I saw a couple of employees without masks and some customers (including myself) but most were still wearing masks here in NY. I bought a 50 count box of those disposable masks at the start of the Panicdemic (Other Bill reference) and I’m positive there are at least 40 left. I wore them in the grocery store and one or two other stores I visited. Never wore a mask in my car or outside.

      I’ll never understand how someone can get used to wearing those damn masks. I’m so glad I’m retired because I would have had a big problem working all day while wearing a mask.

      I don’t really care if people still choose to wear a mask but don’t expect the same from me. My wife still wears a mask in the stores but that’s her choice; she has no issue with me or others who have decided to forgo the mask. She doesn’t wear a mask outside when we walk around the neighborhood, just in the stores.

    • “In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

      Almost two hundred years later, this sounds suspiciously like a description of “the science” of “fake news”.

  3. The mask mandates are total bullshit especially now that most people over 50 have been vaccinated for covid. Perhaps we should have a massive mask burning in various stadiums across the country. I will certainly join in if it happens.

  4. Maybe I’m overeacting, but I find this Vox piece terrifying. Even after the government has proven exactly why it is insane to give it more power or to trust it to run our lives, this typical progressive organ can write that Americans didn’t trust the government enough and expects the zombie hordes to agree.

    • I like the graphic at the top of the screed. It shows CoronaVirus patients desperately awaiting urgent medical care in a parking lot with what appear to be first responders in hazmat suits ready to administer health needs. I really like that in the foreground is an African American woman with a respirator. The message is pretty clear: “You indvidualist antimaskers and antivaxxers are racists and don’t care about grandma!”

      But, on the larger issue, I want to know that the German Lopezes of the world exist and write this kind of drivel. I would rather read it and move on then have it forced underground.

      This is the second paragraph:

      “In the federal government’s previous pandemic playbook, the initial actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration, and advice given by experts, there was a common theme: that America would come together against a major national threat, helping put it down collectively.”

      Lopez goes on to blame selfish people for the current crisis. He ignores that the federal, state, and local governments, along with the medical community, destroyed the trust society needed to make informed decisions. NIH, CDC, Trump, and a host of everyone in between gave contradictory and confusing information. The CDC said the virus would be a bad flu and not to worry only to issue a statement 14 seconds later declaring space invaders were coming to level the planet. Trump, though consistent in his message (“Don’t let this thing rule your life”), didn’t help because of his extreme statements that directly contradicted the idiots in charge (Fauci, Birx?).

      Politicians – local and federal, state governors and big city mayors told us to stay at home (but not to pray the Rosary for fear of CoronaVirus spackle) while they were doing exactly the opposite. I mean, Gavin Newsome told everyone to stay home while he was bounding off to a pricey restaurant. That Austin mayor guy, though, took it to new levels when he pleaded with Austinites to stay home from the safety of his high priced Mexican resort hotel.

      The media did its best to fuel the hysteria to turn the 2020 election results in Democrats’ favor. They told us that CoronaViruses respect BLM protests (they’re the good ones) but not Trump rallies (they’re bad ones). CNN, Fox, MSNBC and the rest had the CoronaVirus death count on the right side of their screens every night for almost a year, intending to create as much fear as possible. They caused a run on paper towels and toilette paper, for Heaven’s sake. They also droned on about everything Trump said or did as if his actions would trigger the Apocalypse. Chris Cuomo told us to stay home in between bike rides and fighting with his neighbors. They also told us that referring to the CoronaVirus as the Wuhan Flu or Wuhan Virus or Wuhan Respiratory Infectious Disease was racist and horrible, promoting the animal to human contagion theory because, well, Trump said it originated in the Wuhan virology lab was just mean and would hack off the Chinese. They wholly failed in their duties to investigate and inform. 2020 was just too important to return the reins of power back to the big, bloated Trump. (Now, they all seem to agree that the lab-leak theory is the most reasonable and likely, but hey, Trump’s an idiot so what does he know?)

      Consequently, we are left with a populous even more distrustful and jaded than before.


      • All I can say, John, is fortunately the German Lopezes of the world are working at Vox, which Victor Davis Hanson aptly calls “The Young Adult Section.” It really is. Frankly, I’m more concerned about all the God Damned young adults working, apparently without adult supervision, at places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR, not to mention major corporations. And UNIVERSITIES!

  5. It seems to me that if you feel the need to wear a mask to protect others then you must believe you are a carrier. If that is the case stay the hell home and quarantine and leave the rest of us alone.

  6. Vox is basically the Huffington Post for kindergarteners.

    Here is another gem from German Lopez.

    To buy a gun, one first must have a license to carry (LTC) or firearms identification card (FID). The LTC encompasses all firearms, including handguns, while the FID only covers rifles and shotguns. The minimum age for an LTC is 21. For the FID, it’s 18 — or 15 with parental permission. Both documents are good for six years. The vast majority of people, police chiefs across the state told me, apply for an LTC since it’s more expansive.

    To obtain either of these, someone first must pay a $100 fee and submit some paperwork to their local police department, where they’re also photographed, fingerprinted, and interviewed. Their information is sent through a state background check system known as MIRCS, which looks at criminal, mental health, and other records. Police can also run other checks, such as via Coplink, which shares information between police departments.

    Applicants also have to take a gun safety course, which teaches safe storage and handling of a firearm but does not involve live firing.

    If applicants make it through all of that, police departments can also use some discretion to decide whether the applicant is a threat to public safety — what’s known as the “suitability” standard. For an FID, police chiefs must petition a court. For an LTC, police chiefs can deem an applicant unsuitable on their own.

    The whole process usually takes two to six weeks, depending on the police department and circumstances involved.

    The idea behind the suitability standard is that there are some things that may not pop up in a person’s criminal or mental health record, but are relevant to whether someone can own a firearm. “Let’s say we’ve been to a house the last four years because the guy is passed out drunk on the front lawn,” Police Chief Bill Brooks of Norwood, Massachusetts, told me. “That would not be a statutory disqualifier. … But it would indicate — to me, anyway — that this person is unsuitable to hold a firearm.”

    • Thanks Michael. But you left out the most interesting bit :

      “The system, experts said, is one of the major reasons Massachusetts consistently reports the lowest gun death rates in the US. Based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, Massachusetts had 3.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2016. In comparison, New Hampshire’s gun death rate was 9.9 per 100,000 people, and the top three worst states for gun deaths in the country — Alaska, Alabama, and Louisiana, all of which have loose gun laws — each had more than 21 gun deaths per 100,000 people.”

      • Andrew:
        Associating restrictive gun laws to lower rates of homicide by gun is a no brainer. These laws are a means to restrict liberty for all because it is easier than dealing with the real problem which is the devaluation of life in many communities. Statistics such as lowest gun death rate are meaningless unless it is in relation to overall homicide rates. What is the overall rate of homicide in these restrictive states? If those committing suicide used drugs instead of a firearm the only difference would be the amount of mess needing to be cleaned up.

        Homicide rates are far higher in poor areas among the less educated than in high income highly educated regions. What might happen if Louisiana, Alabama and Alaska all had the same level of per capita income and academic attainment as Massachusetts residents? So to compare 3 of the poorest states ( in terms of rates of poverty) to a rich state like Massachusetts where per capita income is nearly 25% higher than the national average is comparing apples to oranges. Gun deaths among prison inmates is lower than anywhere per 100,000 so should we lock everyone up to achieve fewer homicides by gun or will we simply trade one means of killing for another?

      • In order to achieve that, the state apparently had to require people to pay a fee to them in order to b e able to possess a firearm.

        According to Rashida Tlaib, policing in our country is inherently and intentionally racist.

        So, in order to achieve this low gun death rate, the state of Massachusetts gave an inherently, intentionally racist institution ” discretion to decide whether the applicant is a threat to public safety” and the ability to “deem an applicant unsuitable on their own”.

        This is what German Lopez supports. To him, gangbangers shooting it out in the streets is such a huge problem that he wants to give more power to racist institutions, to undermine equal protection.

        • Having to pay a fee to the state to exercise a constitutional right is per se unconstitutional, just like a poll tax. The state can’t make a woman pay the state to have an abortion, either.

    • I bet Vox would go into hysterics if we used the Massachusetts gun logic to voting rights. Make the process hard to exercise your right so fewer people will do so. Maybe fewer civics impaired persons would vote.

  7. What it all boils down to is that the left, and its adherents, and its apologists like this publication, are happy to get the government all the power it can have and more as long as it is in the service of the ideology that they follow. I have said again and again that they are perfectly willing to curtail every freedom except the freedom to get an abortion as long as it advances their cause. It was just not much easier this year because they had suddenly empowered career bureaucrats on their side, and they were able to outsource suppression of free speech to Big tech. They also had the tidal wave that was black lives matter and the tidal wave of outrage that was generated by the Capitol riot. This moved the left as close to absolute and unbreakable power as it has ever been in this nation’s history, however, even this was not enough to quite put them over the top. This is partly because their numbers in Congress are razor thin, and they just couldn’t win enough elections to put them over the top in the Senate, not to mention the fact the two of their own won’t go along with everything they want. Because of that, they’re big agenda appears to be dead in the water, and it is most likely only a matter of time before one or both chambers of Congress flip. They wanted this to be 2009 all over again where nothing could stop them. They are also still angry about 2016 and the four years of so-called progress that we have lost as a result. If you don’t get that, based just on the bills they have proposed in this first 6 months, then you never will. Unfortunately, they are not going to get to pass a law federalizing most elections, or a new gun ban, or abolition of the electoral college, or reparations, or any of these other big ticket items better meant to upend the American system and put them permanently in power.

    So they resort to the next level down, which is sending their minions in the media against the American people, to scold them, call them names, say they are being unpatriotic, they are not doing their part, or even that they are traitors. Wear your mask, they say, or you are endangering other people and being selfish. Close down, they say, it’s a sacrifice for the greater good. Go along with whatever the powers that be in the Democratic party say, they say, or you’re a racist.

    Here’s the strange thing though. I know I’m going back almost two decades now, but I was there and so were a lot of the people on this site. This country briefly united after 9/11, but it wasn’t a year after that the left was attacking every measure put in place after that attack, and and saying how dare anyone say that if you are not with us you are with the terrorists. They did not like the idea that a chunk of their allies, particularly the pacifist left and the Free Mumia fringe we’re going to be branded as traders for not going along with the war on terror. In the end they are just political hacks, except no one is ever a political hack for his own side. I once said that the only difference between being well read and being pedantic was whether you agreed with the person. That’s also the only difference between courageous activist and problem gadfly, free speech and dangerous speech, and a whole host of other differences that aren’t really differences. It’s just a question of who is doing the classifying.


    That’s probably close. From

    “Excess mortality is a term used in epidemiology and public health that refers to the number of deaths from all causes during a crisis above and beyond what we would have expected to see under ‘normal’ conditions.”

    “The raw death count helps give us a sense of scale: for example, the US suffered roughly 360,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 26 January and 3 October 2020, compared to 209,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period.”

    Their blurb Only counts between January 26 and October 3rd, but if you look at the chart, between October and February, there was an excess death rate of 40,000+- people a week, I think the 2020 total is going to be safely north of 500,000.

    Now… That doesn’t mean that everyone died from Covid. As an example, there was data released last week that showed that despite 2020 being a massive lowpoint in the number of miles driven, vehicle fatalities increased almost 10% year over year, and that’s being attributed to people being more willing to engage in risky driving behaviors because the roads were relatively empty and perceived as unmonitored.

    I also have it in the back of my head that this is probably a leading edge measurement. The people who died from Covid tended to not be people in good health to begin with, and so while they might have died earlier than they would have without Covid, it’s possible, probable even, that we’re front-loading deaths that would have happened in 2021 into 2020. Now that the population is mostly vaccinated or has antibodies, my expectation is that 2021 will have a negative, deeply negative, excess fatality rate for the year.

  9. When the US writes its next pandemic playbook, it can’t ignore this reality.

    The stopped clock is right once. Tell the truth to Americans or get the finger.


    The stopped clock is right twice. Any solution must uniquely address the United States circumstances as a the world’s largest open economy, and unique commitment to individual freedom.

    This quote also ignores basic geography. The United States is 5 times larger than any single Western European nation. The US has proportionally 5 times more cases and deaths than nations such as England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Either all western nations failed equally, or the United States is simply not an outlier.

    Even if the US were over counting it is still not doing badly compared to countries with similar demographics.


    This overlooks that it was a collectivist nation that lied and distracted to protect it collective reputation than openly warn the world about what was happening. This ignores that it was condemned as racist to prohibit travel to viral hot spots.

    This also ignores the basic geography that the only relatively liberal collectivist cultures (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc) are literal or figurative islands, where access could be strictly controlled to prevent widespread infection. (These countries are also struggling to deploy vaccines.)


    I’ve posted about this before, but there were 500,000 more deaths in the US that occurred in 2020 compared to 2019. These deaths were evenly distributed across all age groups, not just the elderly. I’ve seen a lot of speculation but little hard evidence that these deaths were caused by collateral impacts of the lockdown rather than the virus directly.

    • But if the deaths were evenly distributed, and we know Wahan deaths were not, then we know the excess death were not caused by the virus. Right? Let’s say all of the deaths legitimately attributed to the virus were people over 80. You can’t then cite deaths of those under 80 to show the virus’s impact.

Leave a Reply to Jack Marshall Cancel reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s
