mindhog @mindhog@liberdon.com

The actions of DHS agents in Portland should surprise no one. This is the agency that has been invading the personal privacy of travelers, wrongfully detaining motorists and labeling a wide range of activist organizations as "national security threats" for almost 20 years.
The only truly frightening thing is that the American people have not demanded an end to this despicable organization by now.

I've often said that the true gem of the US system of government is not democracy, but separation of powers.
It's always exciting, and often frightening, when those centers of power come to loggerheads.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/portland-mayor-demands-trump-keep-federal-agents-in-your-own-buildings-or-have-them-leave-our-city

Here is the failure of our press and our government, revealed in all of its naked disfigurement. The press has failed to do its only job: to disseminate information objectively. And our governments have failed to acknowledge their own ignorance, typically favoring _any_ action (even enormously, demonstrably bad action) over simply allowing their constituents to make up their own minds as to how best to protect themselves and their communities.

At no point in this crisis have any mainstream voices come forth and confessed "look, we honestly have no idea how best to deal with this, so we're going to present you with the best science we have on the subject and let you make up your own minds and do what you feel appropriate in the context of your businesses, your community organizations and your personal relationships."

So what do you do? Well, if you're any kind of decent doctor, you tell the patient "I've talked to a bunch of experts: some believe we should watch this and see how it progresses and some believe we should immediately amputate your leg in case this is something lethal. I honestly don't know which is the better thing to do, but I'll try to answer your questions as well as I can and hopefully you can make your own informed decision."

By way of an analogy: Imagine you are a doctor, and a patient comes to you with a bizarre growth you had never seen before on their leg. You consult the experts: Some say "we've never seen anything like this before and it's possible it could kill the patient. Better amputate that leg." And others say "we've never seen anything like this before, but it doesn't seem to be cancer and the patient is not suffering from any other symptoms.. Why don't you see how this progresses?"

The truth likely lies somewhere in between, and I won't attempt to unravel it here. The issue that concerns me is how our institutions -- specifically the press and the government -- are framing the situation to present policy prescriptions in line with their ideologies.

You wouldn't guess this from the news media, though. Depending on the politics of the news outlet you are consuming, you would be led to believe that either this is the next Great Plague and will kill millions if we don't all wear N95 masks everywhere and shut down all forms of social interaction or that this is nothing worse than a bad flu season and we should all go about business as usual.

Over the past few months, in the course of paying attention to all of the news related to COVID-19, one thing has become clear to me: the science surrounding this virus and the illness it causes is still quite ambiguous. In spite of all of our efforts, there's a huge amount about this disease (and epidemics in general, for that matter) that we obviously don't know.

The attempt to deface the Libertarian archetype is thus a corralling effort. By painting the Libertarian identity as one of the "deplorable" positions, the shepherds of the Left are attempting to prevent any sort of intellectual exodus to the new Right. They are attempting to strangle the baby in its cradle.

And this, I believe, cuts to the core of the Left's animosity towards Libertarianism: the perception that this ideology may develop into the new face of the Right, and that it may be more appealing to many of their core constituency than their current direction of Progressivism and identity politics.