They’re coming to lock you away ha-ha!

Are Climate Lockdowns coming next? These guys seem to think so.

For my part, last Summer I predicted that this would soon be attempted here in California. I suggested to a friend that the COVID lockdows were a test case, to see how far they could push us before we would push back. I thought that having seen how successfull they were in convincing us to do virtually anything they wanted us to do in order to “keep us safe” from COVID, that they had already begun to think about how they could use the same playbook for other pet issues that they had not been able to impose via the ballot box.

Like the California version of a Green New Deal.

What I suggested to my friend last Summer was a campaign called something like “STAY HOME, SAVE THE PLANET!”. This campaign would include, among other things, a new law limiting the number of miles you could commute in a single week. The idea would be to try to force people to either work from home a few days a week or move into the higher density cities (where, by the way, they could be more easily taxed). As usual, of course, this would only impact the poor since the rich would be given an exemption where, for a fee, they could continue to drive as much as they want. They might even lie and call such a law “temporary” in order to make it easier for us to swallow. I can see the slogans now “100 miles per week to flatten the climate curve!”

Here’s the problem for the State though. This doesn’t work without fear. People are genuinely terrified of COVID to the point where they are willing to do almost anything just to “feel” safe… like double-masking while driving alone in their car… or literally every single thing this crazy person does.

I remember going to see OUTBREAK in the theaters back when it came out. One of the women who was with me got so freaked out during the scene where a coughing infected man gets hundreds of people sick in a movie theater that she had to flee the scene. I don’t think I understood until that day how much deadly viruses create a sort of primal terror in most Americans. Sort of the way no one realized how much Americans were terrified of sharks until JAWS was released in theaters. And that terror can be easily harnessed by craven politicians, as we’ve seen.

But Climate Change! just does not trigger that same level of fear. It is consistently at (or near) the bottom of every single poll done about American policy priorities. Every single time. I just don’t see how they’ll convince Americans to bend over and take it on climate change the way they have with COVID, because we just aren’t afraid of bad weather in quite the same way.

But then I’ve underestimated Americans many times before.