Allow me to pile on this revealing episode involving the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, of the Pacific Heights enclave in San Francisco.
Ms. Pelosi getting caught on camera violating restrictions on hair salons reveals how inane it has become in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. It also is a microcosm of where America is headed if or when climate policies take hold. That is, the lives of the wealthy and powerful (Pelosi is both) go on uninterrupted, while the peasants (most everyone else) must obey and sacrifice.
First, let’s be clear: hair matters! Count me in favor of Speaker Pelosi getting her hair done professionally – and thus should the rest of America be permitted the same.
The older one gets, the more important becomes the care and nurturing of one’s hair, especially when you start losing it (men) or when it turns inexorably gray (women). Look no further than the blizzard of ads to fight hair loss, perform “natural” coloring, or produce “sleek and shiny hair!”
The state of California, nonetheless, disagreed with my trite hair analysis, since it decreed hair salons were not “essential” and thus forbade them from opening since last March, though some restrictions eased in May. For San Francisco, what is currently “allowed” and “not allowed” for hair treatment is here.
Speaker Pelosi broke these rules with her recent trip to the hair salon because she thought she could. More hilarious were her cringe-worthy explanations after she was caught – forgetting that cameras are ubiquitous in today’s America. On a normal day, Ms. Pelosi regularly insults our intelligence and hurls invective at her political opponents. The media rarely push back.
This hair episode was too much. It is not just Pelosi’s elitism on display for violating the rules she demands everyone else obey, but it’s her playing the victim with her babe-in-the-woods routine of claiming to be “set up” by the salon owner and demanding an apology.
Speaker Pelosi has many characteristics, but naïve and credulous are not among them.
There are larger issues to consider from this Pelosi “hairgate” moment, which is newsworthy not for maintaining great hair for a woman of 80, but for her hypocrisy and prevaricating.
First, the remaining Covid-19 economic lockdowns must end, and should have ended long ago in spring when we succeeded in keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed with infected people. Hair salons, restaurants, and other businesses with narrow profit margins have suffered long, and working class and middle income Americans by the millions have sacrificed economically, with many losing their jobs permanently. Enough already.
The good news is the coronavirus is sharply receding, according to data on weekly hospitalization rates for all age groups compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. This is occurring as more of the country opens, with more people working. Children, in particular, are at very low risk, with a lower than four one hundredths percent chance of fatality (.04%).
Second, climate policies being demanded by billionaires and socialist politicians, with presidential candidate Joe Biden as the front man, will reorder society in ways that make living with coronavirus seem tame.
For Covid, millions of Americans were told to lose their jobs and livelihoods, and are still being told to sacrifice their children’s education and well-being – all to fight the coronavirus.
Similarly, Americans are being told by the Biden-Harris-Bernie-AOC climate platform that Americans must lose their jobs in the fossil fuel industry, and related industries like transportation, which will have major economic downsides on still more jobs in hospitality, construction and other sectors. Americans also will have to sacrifice by paying more taxes and much higher energy costs. After all, we’re told, Earth is soon reaching the “tipping point.”
For both Covid and climate change, rarely if ever are the politicians espousing such policies called to defend scientifically why it is necessary or justified to economically sacrifice millions of Americans. Most of the media has long since abandoned such a role, perhaps because so many of them are among the “one percent,” making high six-figure and seven-figure salaries. As with Covid, their jobs are not at risk from climate change edicts, and they can virtue-signal with the elite chorus about how much they care about the planet.
As mentioned on CFACT recently, millionaires, billionaires and politicians can skirt the rules and afford the price of the brave new world of command, control and sacrifice to fight climate change (and Covid). Not so for the rest of us.