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Ron Paul epitomizes the fatal fallacy of conservatives: Since the lockdowns prevented millions of deaths, conservatives insist we “overreacted”

04/21/2020 // Mike Adams // Views

Tags: bad math, badhealth, badmedicine, badscience, coronavirus, covidiots, denialism, infections, isolation, lockdowns, logical fallacy, outbreak, overreaction, pandemic, quarantines, Ron Paul, stupid

Just as we predicted six weeks ago, when the lockdowns work to halt the exponential spread of the virus, the worst-case death projections will be averted, saving millions of lives. But the lower death count will cause shortsighted people to claim the virus wasn't that dangerous to begin with, and they will claim the lockdowns therefore weren't necessary at all.

Since we aren't seeing millions of deaths, essentially, they claim we "overreacted."

This argument is now being made by none other than Ron Paul, who joins a large number of conservatives who are essentially arguing that if your house has a small kitchen fire, and the fire department arrives with a large fire engine to douse the fire, they weren't necessary at all since your house didn't burn down.

Ron Paul's argument is intellectually dishonest and lacking in any real knowledge of how an infectious bioweapon spreads and why strong social distancing averts millions of deaths which would have otherwise occurred without the lockdowns.

Does Ron Paul think burglar alarms cause crime, too?

He also argues that since there are more deaths in areas with the most strict lockdowns, that aggressive lockdowns cause more infections, essentially. This is like arguing that burglar alarms cause crime because high-crime areas have more burglar alarms. Here's how Ron Paul explains it:

Kentucky, a strict lockdown state, is five times more populated than South Dakota, yet it has some 20 times more coronavirus deaths. If lockdown and house arrest are the answer, shouldn’t those numbers be reversed, with South Dakota seeing mass death while Kentucky dodges the coronavirus bullet?

Again, this is like arguing that police cause crime because high-crime areas have more police. The entire reason Kentucky went into a strict lockdown was because the spread of infections and hospitalizations was on track for catastrophe. The lockdowns halted the exponential spread.

If we had continued with business as usual, we would be on track for millions of deaths in the USA by July

What Ron Paul and nearly all conservatives fail to grasp is basic exponential math. Without the lockdowns, the United States would have reached the point of 80,000 deaths a day by early July. The 2,000+ deaths per day we've seen recently wouldn't have been anywhere near the peak. The deaths would have kept rising until millions were dead by the end of July. At that point, Ron Paul and other conservatives would have blasted the federal government for "not acting soon enough."

But when Trump and many state governors acted in mid-March to halt the exponential spread of the virus, they averted those millions of deaths, cutting off the death trend at a level that may hopefully only see fewer than 75,000 deaths by the end of July. It was the lockdowns that achieved this.

We don't know who created the following illustration, but it's brilliant. It shows that once the lockdowns start working, ignorant people claim we "overreacted" because the deaths start to fall:

It is astonishing that someone as bright as Ron Paul can't see this. It raises questions about whether something has zapped the brain cells of prominent conservatives, causing them all to forget how to do math. The same brain damage appears to have occurred with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other prominent conservatives, too, leading to Michael Savage and myself lashing out against the science illiteracy and mathematical stupidity (which I have dubbed the stupid-19 disease) that now seems to dominate conservative thought leaders.

It makes us wonder: Is Ron Paul also going to now claim the virus doesn't exist and that masks don't work?

If so, why stop there? Why not go full denialism and go all-in with the Flat Earth society which claims gravity is an illusion and that outer space doesn't exist.

To claim that social distancing lockdowns don't halt the spread of a biological weapon that spreads from person to person is about the same degree of absurdity as claiming the Earth is flat.

Ron Paul is famous for wanting to "audit the Fed" to find out the truth behind the Fed's numbers. So why isn't he curious about the truth behind the exponential spread of a biological weapon that will continue to double every 3.5 days if you don't stop it?

In fact, had the nation waited just one more week before initiating the lockdowns, we would be on track to see 240,000 deaths over the next couple of months instead of only 60,000 deaths. (That's because the number of infections doubles every 3.5 days, so there are two doublings per week. 60 x 2 x 2 = 240.)

Similarly, if the lockdowns had started just a week earlier, the total casualties would have been closer to 15,000 rather than 60,000. Imagine the outcry then! "Not enough people died!" would be the rallying cry of conservatives who would claim the lockdowns weren't necessary at all since a very small number died.

We should set up a "math-free zone" where pandemic denialists can infect each other and observe the spread of infectious disease firsthand

As it turns out, the only way to teach conservatives about infectious disease is to allow them all to infect each other so they can grasp the power of exponential spread.

We should have a "math-free zone" in America where people like Ron Paul can gather and infect each other with no masks and no social distancing. Or maybe we'll call it a "mask free zone," and we can let conservatives imagine that mask-free zones prevent infections in the same way that liberals believe "gun-free zones" prevent shootings.

If people want to perish from their own delusions, I say let them proceed. Just don't come complaining to the rest of us who told you what was going to happen. Some of us can do math, and in this darwinian moment of natural selection, we prefer not to join the covidiot suicide cult that thinks infectious diseases are a hoax.

Ron Paul embarrasses himself by claiming the lockdowns weren't necessary after they've averted millions of deaths. Yet his ignorance appears to be commonplace across conservative America, where masks are now seen as an object of enslavement, to be rejected by all "patriotic" people.

This is madness. In the middle of a raging pandemic that spreads from person to person, Trump supporters have decided that masks are bad. This is the equivalent of arguing that in the middle of a gun fight, ballistic vests are bad.

So why not just restart all the Trump rallies, then, and see what happens as infected Trump supporters join together in giant indoor arenas, spreading the virus in tightly packed crowds of covidiots who apparently don't believe in the Germ Theory. I can't think of a more effective way for Trump to lose the coming election than to watch his own supporters kill themselves off as they reject masks in the name of "freedom!"

Personally, I think Trump has likely already lost the election, but even if he wins it, when will his own supporters realize he's transformed the U.S. economy into a Soviet-style economic system where the government pays the wages, controls the prices, rigs the markets and owns all the assets? Even if Trump wins, free market capitalism is already dead in America, thanks to Trump's own policies of endless bailouts and fiat currency printing.

People who cheer for Trump aren't cheering for American values anymore. They're cheering for the big banks, Big Tech, Big Pharma and the vaccine industry, because that's who runs the White House now, as is abundantly obvious. I've waited for over three years for Trump to do something to protect free speech, investigate the vaccine industry and work to end Big Pharma's monopoly control over the nation, and he has done nothing on any of these fronts.

And for those of you who still think you can "trust the plan," you're delusional. The plan all along has been to crush your freedom, loot your wealth, oppress your speech and eventually exterminate humanity. That's the plan, and you're watching it play out every day in America, with Trump apparently going right along with the most evil institutions that are carrying it out.

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