In the early 2000s, entertainers Penn and Teller did a show called shit! that aired on Showtime, in which the iconic duo applies their sense of humor and libertarian sensibilities to kill many sacred cows.
In recently rewatching some episodes of the show that I enjoyed back then, one moment in particular contained a brief bit of what can only be described as the purest prophecy.
this specific episode since 2003 he covered the manufactured secondhand smoke health panic and the crusaders who used fake “science” to ban smoking in New York City restaurants and bars, which, as we now know, was the platform of launching similar smoking bans that swept the country. .
The fact that cigarette smoke is unpleasant to many people was not a reasonable argument for the government to impose smoking bans on establishments owned and visited by free citizens. Any bar or restaurant, at that time, could choose to allow or prohibit smoking in their establishment. The strength of the argument for a smoking ban was not based on logic, cost-effectiveness or freedom, but was based solely on the idea that second-hand smoke was harmful to passive customers and employees.
Anyone who visits or works in such an establishment would have chosen to be there, of course. But that didn’t matter. It was the government’s job to protect these workers and customers from themselves and others, they argued, from the “consensus” understanding of the dangers of secondhand smoke.
A crusader for the cause said almost everyone agreed that secondhand smoke causes cancer, including the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The problem, as the show points out, is that they were all basing that conclusion on the same thing flawed 1993 Environmental Protection Agency study this suggests that up to 3,000 people die a year from secondhand smoke. In 1998, a court scolded that study, saying it “cherished” its data and “departed from acceptable scientific procedure” to “ensure a predetermined outcome.”
Also in 1998, a World Health Organization study came to the unequivocal conclusion that its “results indicated no association between childhood exposure to ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) and the risk of lung cancer” and that the risk of cancer from secondhand smoke among adults was “not statistically significant”. The problem was that these conclusions were buried in the conclusions of the report. Most people didn’t read beyond the headline of the press release, which made a claim that is directly contradicted by the findings of the study it was directing the public to: “PASSIVE SMOKE CAUSES LUNG CANCER, DON’T LET IT THEY’RE CHEATING YOU.”
In short, as talk show host Larry Elder says on the show:
they lied They lied to us. They overestimated, they ignored their own conclusions, they ignored their own standards of significant risk to reach a politically arrived at conclusion. they lied
There were, for most people living and voting at the time, unintended consequences of allowing lawmakers to outlaw things some people don’t like based on the “scientific” reasoning of obscure and dishonest public health. But there were some far-sighted souls who saw the danger in allowing the government that kind of power, and a couple of them were interviewed in a New York City bar for this episode.
As one cigar-smoking gentleman says to the camera crew, “Should we stop eating pie because America is an obese society?”
At the time, that was an absurd thought. But just a decade after that episode aired, Mayor Nanny Bloomberg was hard at work ban sugary drinks it was sold in anything larger than a 16-ounce container because six out of ten New Yorkers were obese, and the media cheered the effort. Fortunately, his efforts were downcast by a Manhattan judge, but as Rick Berman of the Center for Consumer Freedom warned about threats like Nanny Bloomberg’s ban, “[i]If you can dictate the size of drinks… you can dictate the size of a slice of cake… the list is only limited by your imagination.”
New Yorkers will later discover that government tyrants have a big imagination when it comes to public health edicts. They would come to find out that the government not only believed it had the authority to tell you how big your slice of pie could be in a restaurant, but that it also had the authority to demand that you couldn’t have any pie in a restaurant restaurant at all. “No cake for you!” said New York’s cake Nazi, Mayor Andrew Cuomo, in 2020. No bagels, no burgers, no pizza, either. You just couldn’t go to a restaurant, for your own sake.
This brings me back to a random old man interviewed on that Penn and Teller show in that bar in New York, nearly 20 years earlier, who profoundly prophesied the soul-stifling, freedom-crushing insanity suffered by Northerners Americans in 2020. “When fascism comes to America,” he said, “it will come with a white coat and a stethoscope.”
The point is that the COVID tyranny didn’t happen in a vacuum and the government didn’t learn it had this power overnight. As this man knew, and we should recognize now, losing something seemingly as trivial to most people as the right to smoke in a bar was a monumental loss of individual liberty that would lead directly to the kind of tyranny we experiment later.
We have not rejected the government’s fabrication of data to construct a narrative that presents secondhand smoke as a substantial cancer risk, because most people did not smoke and would rather not endure smoke in bars than fight for their fellow citizens . right to freedom But in doing so, we accepted that it was appropriate for the government to limit individual liberty on the basis of its health prescriptions, and further the tyrants learned that they could invent reasons for doing so hiding behind studies that their agencies created and marketed, and that the hoi polloi supposedly wouldn’t understand.
As with secondhand smoke, a myriad of government agencies acted as an organ in 2020 to distribute the message that school closings, economic shutdowns, silly cloth masks, and mandates to inject an invented drug hastily were the only ways to keep us safe from COVID-19. . You had to save yourself and your fellow citizens who did not choose to follow the state approved guidelines.
Now we know exactly that none of this was always true. And not only did we get COVID anyway, but we suffered incomprehensible collateral damage to our economy, our children, and our national psyche. And what Larry Elder said about the government’s push to exaggerate the risk of secondhand smoke twenty years ago applies equally to the government’s push to exaggerate the risk of COVID for the vast, vast majority of northerners -Americans: “they lied” to reach a “political reach”. in conclusion.” Nothing was ever nobler than this.
Not only have the government agencies and myriad tyrants responsible for all of this never apologized, they insist they were acting justifiably and in their rightful mandated capacity. And why wouldn’t they? We have never resisted significantly in recent decades as they have progressively eroded our freedoms.
Make no mistake: They’re doing the same thing right now, in states like California, where soon you will not be able to buy a gas lawn mower or a non-electric car, to large federal initiatives, such as the White House, right now, exercising its emergency powers ban gas appliances, all based on “climate change” studies produced by various government agencies acting in unison to achieve these politically driven desired outcomes.
There is no reason for them to doubt that this will not work. After all, we can do without lawnmowers and gas stoves, just as we could do without smoking in bars.
It’s just trivial stuff. right?
Image via Pexels.
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