The Complicit Midwit

Atlanta, GA

October 16, 2021

Everywhere we turn, Morons and Midwits abound. These are not synonymous, and the latter are frequently more dangerous than the former.

Some Morons can be managed and handled, and often are…usually by the deep state cronies and chislers who arrange to have them elected. But many Morons have their own mind, defective as it may be. The Midwit mind, on the other hand, is easy to surreptitiously fill and steer. It is not so much “managed”, as manipulated.

A Midwit is not the same as a nitwit. He isn’t an idiot, except as the useful sort. To the contrary, he can be of above-average intelligence…albeit not too far above. He is typically “educated”, and superficially “informed”…but only about what he is expected to “know”.

He reads the “right” papers, watches the appropriate shows, and confidently regurgitates conventional wisdom and approved opinions. He reliably asserts what everybody knows, but acts as if you’d never heard it before he recycled it.

He is the arm-chair epidemiologist, meteorologist, and general who absorbs his “history” from Ken Burns and his “science” from Dr Fauci. He fits in at cocktail parties and with the crowd, and will say nothing to risk being excluded from the one or standing out from the other.

The Midwit can do a lot of damage with his carefully choreographed (mis)information. He defers unquestionably to government officials and bureaucratic “experts”, respecting their credentials while simply assuming their competence. And if they are “wrong”, it is only because his fellow plebes or the opposing politicians were insufficiently assiduous in following their orders.

Many Midwits give lip-service to liberty, but only if it doesn’t interfere with an abstract, undefined “greater good”. They readily yield freedom to fear. They tend to believe that we “can’t be too careful”, that “safety is our top priority”, and that everyone else should adopt or accommodate their protective preferences.

The Midwit traffics in such seductive banalities as “The Common Good”, “The Greater Good”, and “We’re all in this together.” These are nebulous, yet time-tested, authoritarian crowbars to pry away individual liberty by convincing its possessors that their natural rights are somehow a danger to everyone else. These are the “social contracts” that no one signed, but to which everyone is somehow accountable.

It was this tyrannical tactic that turned breathing into a lethal weapon, justifying eradication of basic liberties in the ostensible name of “protecting” the well-being of others. The same argument could historically have been made about flu, pneumonia, or any other airborne ailment. Till 18 months ago, that notion would’ve seemed preposterous. Because it is.

But the Midwits went along, because their “experts” said so. They complaisantly acquiesced to “sheltering-in-place” for “15 days to flatten the curve.” Then, for months thereafter, they kept mail outside, wiped down packages, stayed six (not five, not seven) feet apart, adhered to stickers on floors, raised plexiglass barriers, strapped on masks, and used “one-way” aisles in grocery stores. Even most Morons questioned the efficacy of these absurdities.

The Midwit is attracted to superficial “solutions” that offer him comfort and exonerate him from blame. He is happy being the sourcing agent who never got fired for hiring IBM. But this can make him particularly susceptible to propaganda and impervious to logic. 

He is easily convinced, for example, that to slow the spread of a virus, governments and their corporate appendages must mandate “vaccines” that don’t slow the spread of a virus. He then fumes at the “unvaccinated”, and insists that if only they’d “do their part”, this would be over. He subscribes to the novel notion that a medicine’s ineffectiveness derives from those who haven’t taken it.

But Midwit memory is short. As he happily carries the “public health” ball toward rapidly receding goalposts, he either forgets or excuses previous assurances that the “pandemic” would “be over” if only we’d hibernate for 15 days, close “unessential” businesses, avoid our families, and cover our faces. 

He happily bought in when the Covid Regime promised that “the vaccines” would be the ticket out. We were told those who took them would be protected from catching or spreading the deadly germ. After we learned the new elixirs didn’t necessarily do either, we were assured no one ever said they would. All we could expect from a “vaccine” was mitigation, not protection. And to the extent they were deficient, it was because of those who didn’t take them.

Now, notwithstanding natural immunity or individual rights, the Midwit echoes his elites in demanding that all leaves flow in the same breeze. Employment, education, travel, dining, entertainment, and even access to medical care are to be made contingent on consuming novel drugs from big pharmaceutical companies…all to suppress an endemic bug from which only certain easily identifiable portions of the population are at serious risk. This is nefarious, insidious, and deranged. 

No one likes to be conned, or to admit he’s been wrong. Especially the Midwit (who, in fairness, probably isn’t aware he fits either description). So he returns repeatedly to the Tarot Card of “The Science”, and parrots its pious platitudes. “Epidemic of the unvaccinated”, “safe and effective”, and “the Greater Good” all roll predictably from his lips. These type tropes are either lies, unproven propositions, or unprovable assertions. 

But to the sanctimonious Midwit, they are soothing, and exculpatory. And I suppose it’s only natural that to anyone who’d been complicit in the calamity of the last couple years, that’d be all that matters.

JD