TRUST, ONCE LOST, IS HARD TO REGAIN.

That recovery is particularly difficult when it is people entrusted with making decisions on the basis of their wisdom or their probity betray it in an egregious way.  In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Erick Erickson notes, "The same government that used pandemic powers to shutter churches and businesses now wants surveillance cameras on street corners and data centers in backyards. You can’t blame people for saying no."

It's not that the warning signs haven't been with us for some time.  Cold Spring Shops posts have used variations on "governance by wise experts" since the fall of 2009, generally in a skeptical way.

That People in Authority dismissed the observations of — wait for it — medical doctors noticing masked people's glasses fogging up in grocery stories and suggesting the mask mandates and six foot circles and the rest were theater, not policy, probably resurrected the notion of a credibility gap.  Yes, dear reader, my life from adolescence onward has been structured by credibility gaps: thus another one emerging during the Jarrett regency's corona tyranny didn't come as a shock.

I was one guy with some disposable income and a web journal.  Others were affected more adversely by the corona tyranny, and they noticed that it was tyranny, even if the social media companies limited their ability to vent.

In March 2020, Americans did as they were told. People closed businesses, local governments closed schools, and families canceled funerals. They waited for instructions from their elected leaders and public health officials because those officials said we needed two weeks to stop the spread. People generally trusted their institutions. Civic trust is a limited resource in a free nation. The press, politicians, bureaucrats, experts, and elite violated that trust until it was gone.

The virus came, the data came, the virus mutated, the data changed, and the people in charge did not.

We knew early on that children were not meaningful vectors for spread. The bureaucrats, the politicians, and above all, the teachers’ unions kept the schoolhouse doors closed anyway. Parents, forced to be home with their kids, saw how atrocious our public education had become, and students, after being shut out of schools, actually regressed. Masks clearly were not stopping the virus, but the army of mentally deranged progressive women harassing people for not wearing masks not only did not stop but has morphed today into a virtue signal and public sign of inward mental health issues. Get on a plane to any progressive enclave and you’ll notice a pattern in who still wears masks.

We knew early on that Covid spread indoors and not outdoors, but California went right on filling in the skate parks.

Do you wonder, dear reader, why when the information technology companies build data centers and facial recognition cameras, while government officials sing of "job creation" or "traffic safety" the people, who, at least on paper, are in charge of the government, say no?

The federal government has arrested American citizens multiple times under the false assumption that they were illegal aliens. These repeated incidents indicate a systemic issue rather than a single error. In states such as Minnesota and California, governments have ignored large-scale fraud within their benefit programs. Officials identified the individuals responsible but chose not to act because doing so would have been socially uncomfortable. In Fairfax County, Virginia, the Commonwealth’s Attorney has frequently released violent individuals who then committed further crimes, including murder. The Trump administration has pursued vindictive lawsuits against their enemies that drive up financial burdens on their enemies, even as courts throw out the lawsuits. The process has become the punishment.

Yes, and "public-private partnership" looks like more fleecing of the citizenry by the rent seekers and their hired hands in public office these days.

People oppose data centers because they do not trust artificial intelligence. They also do not trust the people who manage it. And, given the claims made by AI’s advocates, you can’t really blame them. The opposition to data centers, superficially, is about the land, the water, the noise, etc. The opposition is really about the fear of AI perpetuated by the tech CEOs themselves who tell us they want our resources to build what many interpret as weapons against us that can be wielded by the government that locked us in our houses.

The nomenklatura showed us who they were.  The Normals believed them.

We are only five years removed from the police arresting solo joggers and the government using police power to shutter churches and small businesses. We witnessed the government use a surveillance state to lock people in their homes. We saw private businesses figure out they could profit from the police state.

Mr Erickson surveys the state of play (both political parties still in thrall to rent-seekers) and concludes the nomenklatura will continue as if business as usual is possible, although no Normal trusts them.

The last six years have taught the elite of both parties and the press that there is no penalty for protecting yourself at the public’s expense. So this will get worse before it gets better, and the people who could fix it will keep wondering aloud why nobody believes them.

Their trust sits in a skate park full of sand and on a beach where a man was arrested for floating alone. It is under a basketball goal with no rim. It is on a television screen where the reporters and experts who collaborated in destroying our trust still have their jobs. They give us the news that we all know is shaped to advance narratives instead of the truth, and all the elite, politicians, pundits, and press wonder why no one trusts them and why they can get nothing done.

If you want your data centers and your cameras that offset a declining pool of police hires and the budgets that cannot accommodate a constable on every street corner, you must re-earn the public trust. An elite that cannot tell us what a girl is, a press that turns the girls to villains against the boys who’d take over their sports, and a political class that cashes in on the system and protects itself instead of the public, is not capable of meeting the present moment.

That from a pundit who sees the value of contemporary data centers (we'll expand on that another day) and facial recognition cameras, at least propery supervised, which is probably a vain hope.