Our Oligarchs’ Crisis Of Confidence – By Declan Leary (The American Conservative) / Feb 1 2021
Let’s not attribute to malice that which can be explained by an insecure elite stumbling back into a tenuous grasp on power.
On November 9, as the first week of election disputes started to wind down, Big Pharma giant Pfizer Inc. announced that its COVID vaccine had been tested and shown to be 90 percent effective. The timing was…fortuitous; cue the crazies.
Donald Trump, Jr. took to Twitter with the kind of vague suggestiveness that usually only works if you have something to suggest: “The timing of this is pretty amazing. Nothing nefarious about the timing of this at all right?” Charlie Kirk, a young conservative intellectual renowned for subtlety and nuance, took a similar tack in a Facebook video: “The reason is Pfizer wanted to wait until Joe Biden was coronated as president, so that Joe Biden could get the credit for this.” (Props to Charlie for the choice of “coronation” there, though his timing was off by a couple months.)
History repeats itself—and since 2020 took all the good material, in 2021 we’ve already hit the reruns. On January 24, word got out that California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom planned to lift his Regional Stay Home Order, one of the strictest anti-COVID measures in the country. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another pandemic hardliner whose iron fist inspired a hilariously ineffective kidnapping plot last year, likewise announced suspiciously close to the inauguration that her loyal subjects would be allowed to dine indoors beginning on February 2.
Once again, murmurs issued from the lower-tier twitterati about the announcements’ suspicious timing. Some of it was serendipity, to be sure. Maybe, like Pfizer’s timeline being pushed back from just before the election to just after the election, it’s just a really bad look dictated by crappy circumstances. COVID numbers in both states are trending downward, and Newsom’s announcement came just as they’d dropped to the same point as when he’d put the order in place a month before. But there is a real question worth asking here, and it lies at the heart of our current political dysfunction: why do the people in power, in government and beyond, consistently act in a way that makes them look like part of some vast left-wing conspiracy? Why are tectonic policy shifts at the state level being arranged around the transfer of power at the federal? Why did the media and big business suddenly change their tune on the miracle date of January 20?
CONTINUE > https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-oligarchs-crisis-of-confidence/
