From March 2020
There are probably two reasons sold-out toilet paper gets a lot of attention. First, a four-pack is about two tenths of a cubic foot, so it takes up more space in the store. When the shelf empties, it’s a better visual than, for instance, the pegboard hook holding the watch batteries, which may or may not sell out in a pandemic. Second, of course, we’re a nation of 10-year-old boys who can’t resist a poop joke.
There is a political, or perhaps a social segment of society that believes the panic over the pandemic is ginned up by liberal interest groups to hurt the re-election chances of their favorite reality TV star. Perhaps they don’t understand the difference between panic and preparation. Preparation is buying extra toilet paper if you may be isolated for a while. Panic is going to the store to stock up and finding the shelves empty.
Several people on Facebook are pushing the liberal fake panic story. I’ve asked a couple what their evidence is, and they say it’s obvious. I’m reminded of Dr. Walter Elias at Virginia State University telling an advanced calculus class about the Behold! method of mathematical proof. You write your conclusion on the board and say, “Behold!” in a loud voice, and the professor is stunned by your brilliance. The implication was he wouldn’t be, but that’s pedagogy, not epidemiology, so let’s not change the subject.
If there is a liberal conspiracy to create panic, I’d love to know how it works. Let’s say Terry McAuliffe decides to send out an email to his MailChimp list telling us all to spread the story so that Joe Biden will win the election. Who curates the list for him? You have to weed out any Berniecrats, who’ll dime out any Corporate Democrat plot, whether it exists or not, and the Warren crowd because she appeals to sincere people, and the Tulsi crowd because they can’t spell. What happens if you miss somebody and they leak the email to Fox News? And what about the people who aren’t dumb enough to fall for the ploy, since we pretty much own the liberal arts intelligentsia? Or what about the people who aren’t evil and sociopathic enough? (I don’t mean to imply that’s a separate group from the liberal arts people.)
Maybe there’s not really a liberal conspiracy to create panic. That doesn’t mean there’s not a liberal conspiracy.
Suppose Jorge Sorostopolous, the Greek liberal billionaire who grew up in socialist Venezuela, is behind the no-panic stories. His paid liberal minions, when they’re not busy registering voters and buying crack with food stamps, are whispering to their conservative friends that it’s all a hoax. And their conservative friends are buying it because preposterous is their baseline. The panic hoax story has everything they need: unlikely, nearly impossible to implement, and not supported by any evidence. Suppose conservative complacency is the real liberal plot.
So what is Sorostopolous’s evil master plan? If the Fox fans are not observing the quarantine, and are spending Saturday night in bars with the Oklahoma governor and his kids, who’s going to get the virus? In the immortal words of Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, it ain’t me, babe. If the virus kills mostly people over 60, whose electoral demographic is that? If Sean Hannity viewers are going to church and Rachel Maddow viewers are watching “Secular Sunrise” on PBS, who’s going to get infected? (Hint for the Hannity crowd: You can’t get pregnant off a toilet seat and you can’t catch COVID-19 off a flatscreen.)
The panic story may turn out to be the best case of double agentry since the Allies dropped a dead body off the coast of Spain in 1944 with fake D-Day plans in a waterproof satchel. Think about it. They’re halfway convinced we run the world and only lose presidential elections as part of our evil plan. They think we’re smarter and better organized than we are. So we convince them that we aren’t really trying to keep people from getting sick and dying, because who cares about that, but that we’re just trying to keep them at home so they can’t go to Trump rallies.
Then again, maybe a lot of conservatives know the pandemic is real, but they don’t want to believe it, so they make up some vapid nonsense to blame their destructive self-interest on somebody else. Nah. That would never happen.