Every offical that was selling the initial lockdown. Just have to get the R0 below 1, remember? You really think the masses would have been OK with a year of lockdowns and the despair that entails up front?
Your conclusions don't match reality. States like Florida have open stadiums and are fairing the same as states like California that insist on totalitarian overreach.
“Westerners with PC leanings” are considered ridiculous by most every culture in the world. If there is any ideology that has a “power grab over language and definition” it is the modern, Western left.
Before the internet you could have two local newspapers in every town, each profitably reporting facts.
Then the internet came and commoditised facts. New facts are disseminated immediately across social media. Open Google News and you can find thousands of articles covering the same event.
Suddenly, just reporting facts was no longer a viable business. Being a newspaper of record was no longer economically viable. Only the news media that shifted to reporting opinions, outrage, and entertainment survived.
The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed.
As George Orwell understood when he created the “memory hole” concept in 1984, an institution that can obliterate memory can control history.
The innovation of the Trump era was companies learned they could operate on a sort of editorial margin, borrowing credibility for unproven stories from audiences themselves, who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage centers.
Mistakes became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer understood as mistakes.
"It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States." — Thomas Sowell
In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.
It is impossible to study the long-term effects of any vaccine within a year. Impossible. Unless you are elderly or immunocompromised you are almost certainly exposing yourself to more personal risk by being vaccinated.
Jack and Jay-Z are pals. Jack is just another milquetoast SV CEO, but loves to surround himself with actual celebrities. This appears to be all but a sycophantic move to maintain his friend circle. It makes zero business sense.