Max Boot built a reputation as a tough talking neoconservative. Hard headed. Clear thinking. Aggressive in defending American interests.
You know the drill. He is a REALIST.
Yeah, no. Not a realist. He is instead always wrong but never in doubt.
Boot is one of those conservatives who was totally broken by Trump. Lots of people from all walks of life were broken by Trump, because breaking people’s minds is a Trump specialty. It’s not like he hasn’t broken the minds of some supporters who are willing to deny that he has a single flaw.
At the height of the COVID pandemic Max Boot–remember, he is a neocon and hence a commie hater–chose to praise China’s Zero-COVID policies because doing so allowed him to attack Trump as soft on COVID. In mid-October 2020 attacking Trump was something of an imperative, so Boot embraced the Chinese Communist Party to do so.
The United States (pop. 328 million) has more than 8.1 million confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 219,000 deaths — the most in the world. China (pop. 1.4 billion) has had fewer than 91,000 confirmed cases and 4,700 confirmed deaths. On Sunday, the United States had 47,637 new cases, compared with 13 in China. The U.S. death rate is about 670 per 1 million people. In China, it’s about three deaths per 1 million people. China’s numbers are probably not entirely accurate, but then, neither are ours — the number of American victims is likely much higher than the official figures indicate.
Ah, Max. Sure, China may be fixing the numbers, but you have to trust the Chinese Communist Party more than the US numbers. Commies can invent them out of thin air, so they are more trustworthy or something. At least the numbers succeeded in confirming Boot’s priors.
China deserves censure for not squelching the novel coronavirus when it started in Wuhan, but since then it has fought a successful battle using tools such as lockdowns, social distancing, contact tracing, mask-wearing and isolation of patients. Some of the things that China has done would be considered too heavy-handed for the United States. In China, even children who test positive are temporarily separated from their parents. (The Trump administration only separates children if they are undocumented immigrants.)
But China’s success is mainly due to the application of science in a country where people are taught to respect science. We live in a country, by contrast, where the president mocks his opponent by sneering: “He’ll listen to the scientists.” This is supposed to be a bad thing?
You have to hand it to Boot–he was and is willing to brave the high dive in order to get Trump. After all, the policies he was describing were and remain utterly dystopian. Welding people into homes; stripping people naked and scalding their skin with boiling disinfectant. The Chinese policies were as well known then as now–even Boot conceded that Americans might feel squeamish about using some of these tactics–but “science” should win out over mere human rights.
Notice how he didn’t criticize the policies, he praised them. He just laments that Americans are too well armed to be welded into their homes.
That was Boot’s argument when Trump was in office; he has never apologized for endorsing China’s approach.
He has, however, been forced to admit it didn’t work.
As every sane human being in the world should have expected when dealing with a highly contagious airborne virus, the only way to stop it is to nuke the site from orbit just to be sure.
Boot is being forced to admit that China’s zero-COVID isn’t working. The videos being smuggled out of China make it impossible for any American to brag about how China got it right, so Boot is being forced to backtrack…a bit.
China’s response to the covid-19 pandemic is widely acknowledged as a costly failure: Its draconian lockdowns have made it hard for ordinary people to get food or medicine and are depressing economic growth. President Xi Jinping’s “zero covid” policy sparked the biggest protests since 1989 and finally led, on Wednesday, to an easing of testing and quarantine rules in what is an implicit admission of failure by Beijing.
It’s easy for Americans to feel cocky by comparison — particularly those Americans who opposed our much milder lockdowns. We have returned to normal life, more or less, while China is still mired in the pandemic. But this is no time for triumphalism. The United States also failed in dealing with covid. We just failed in very different ways.
The United States has the highest number of confirmed deaths from the pandemic: more than 1.1 million. By comparison, if official statistics are to be believed, just 5,235 Chinese have died of the disease. While China claims to have one of the lowest death rates in the world, the United States has one of the highest.
First of all, comparing statistics across countries is a dangerous business. Even statistics across local jurisdictions can be tricky because how the numbers are determined can change quite a bit. And in the US there are huge financial incentives to classify deaths as caused by COVID–health care providers are paid many thousands more for a COVID patient–and in other countries the incentive may be to find fewer COVID deaths for political reasons.
Certainly that is the case in China, where Chairman Xi has staked his political legitimacy on zero-COVID. Boot knows beyond a doubt that China is lying, but is using their numbers anyway to make a point.
That is called dishonesty. Lying. Being a propagandist. He still endorses China in a fundamental way, knowing everything that he does. Further, he has made it clear that if China had actually managed to suppress COVID, using the tactics of concentration camps, starving people in their homes, burning people alive in skyscraper fires would all have been worthwhile.
Too bad it didn’t work, but glad the experiment was done!
What an assh0le.
Why does he persist in going down this path? Because Trump. He cannot give up on Trump.
the primary problem was the populist, anti-government, anti-science dogma of President Donald Trump and so many other Republican officials and voters. Flocking to the misguided banner of “medical freedom,” they were skeptical of the need for lockdowns to “flatten the curve” in the pandemic’s early days, contemptuous of the need to wear masks, and hostile to vaccine mandates — and indeed to vaccines themselves. Covid “denialism” and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories infected the right-wing infosphere.
A normal person would stop and think for a moment about this fact: Sweden was the country that veered closest to medical freedom over government mandates, not the United States. And while it is not widely publicized, Sweden has the lowest excess mortality rate in Europe right now. Their COVID death numbers were mildly higher, but their overall death rate is actually LOWER than their European neighbors.
Trump, to his discredit, endorsed many of the policies Boot likes until well into the pandemic. It was Trump who implemented Project Warp Speed that created a vaccine in record time–months, not years. Nobody else did that. We aren’t using a Chinese vaccine, and nobody else is either. Their vaccine is notoriously useless. Trump only soured on these policies fairly late. Boot doesn’t care about that.
Boot has an obsession, and one shared by so many on the Left: Trump. He will believe, or at least say, anything to hate on Trump.
What is remarkable to me is not that many Republicans rejected Trump; his appeal was always being a new kind of Republican. Those attached to the old kind of Republican, especially the neocons, had every reason to reject Trump. He despised them and they returned the favor.
It even could have been, and in a few at least was, a kind of integrity. If they stuck to their principles–in the same way that Sinema is by becoming an Independent and rejecting both sides–I would have been impressed. Going out into the wilderness to save their own souls. Right or wrong, sticking to your principles is admirable. That is why Bernie Sanders gets more grudging respect from Republicans than Biden or HRC.
But that isn’t what happened with many of these folks. Not all, but the Max Boots of the world.
They just switched sides. They abased themselves before the Left. They started praising the Adam Schiffs, the Nancy Pelosis, even the Joe Bidens. They abandoned their principles, which showed they had none. Former federalists endorse centralization.
The United States has paid a tragically high price for the hostility to science and government exhibited by so many of its citizens. Those woes have been exacerbated by the decentralization in our political system. Even though we elected a president in 2020 who understood the gravity of the crisis, the federal government doesn’t have the authority to impose vaccine mandates on red states.
Looking back on the era where neocons roamed the political landscape as the apex predators one thing becomes clear: they loved the idea of centralizing and using power to their own ends. That is why they rushed to embrace the security state. Silly people like me backed them because we wanted to preserve American freedoms; they actually saw an opportunity to constrain American freedoms.
How else to explain the neocon’s lament that the US isn’t more like China?
Live and learn.
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