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The “hysteria” surrounding COVID-19 is causing Americans to police themselves for lockdown and mask violations for fear their neighbors or relatives will turn on them, a situation “similar to communist China,” a California psychiatrist warned recently.
“We don’t need a police force. We don’t need a secret Stasi to go after the neighbor that isn’t wearing his mask on a park bench. We have families who are willing to do that,” Dr. Mark McDonald, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in West Lost Angeles, said during the Truth Over Fear Summit, a virtual conference on the coronavirus organized by broadcaster Patrick Coffin.
“We have office workers [who] will come by and mace you if you are not wearing a mask, and no one will come to your rescue,” McDonald continued. “In fact, they’ll probably applaud it.”
In McDonald’s professional opinion, the fear that the government and the media have instilled in so many Americans has “become so entrenched that it has reached a state of what I would call delusional psychosis.”
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“Fear has become a new virtue. Never before in the history of this country have we told people that fear is good” or to “settle into” those fears and allow them “to control and constrain your life,” he said.
McDonald pointed out that while many Americans believe that everyone is equally at risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19, “it is a lie.” In fact, the only group of people at serious risk of death from the virus is those over age 70, particularly those with multiple comorbidities. Everyone else has at least a 99.5-percent chance of surviving the disease, and even the elderly stand a 94.6-percent chance.
Despite the fact that such information is readily accessible, many Americans continue to be unreasonably afraid of COVID-19 to the point that the “hysteria” is creating a situation of “group control,” whereby those who aren’t afraid of the virus nevertheless find themselves donning masks or social distancing in an effort to avoid confrontations with their panicked friends and neighbors, McDonald argued.
To illustrate his point, McDonald related some anecdotes from his own life. LifeSiteNews recounted them thus:
During a recent flight on Delta Airlines, a “furious” flight attendant “castigated me” for drinking water for more than three minutes, and continued to “hound” him throughout the flight, McDonald related.
When the plane reached its destination, McDonald was “escorted off” and interviewed by a station manager. Two weeks later, he received a letter from Delta banning him from flights “in perpetuity,” or until the airline withdrew its mask mandate.
Moreover, McDonald was later told by the person he was traveling with that “all the passengers erupted into applause” after he was escorted off the plane, because “their anxiety was relieved by me being punished for not appropriately wearing the mask as requested, as demanded.”
During another flight, McDonald went to the galley for some water, and an attendant on her break offered to get him some, but was berated by an on-duty flight attendant for not wearing a mask.
McDonald said he was “stunned” by this behavior on the part of passengers and crew.
“So the end result of this: what appears to me is a country which is using its own citizens as a de facto police force, very similar to communist China, that has a social point system in place where neighbor informs on neighbor, family informs on family,” he said.
“This has a terribly damaging effect on our society.”
Because of Americans’ “delusional psychosis,” McDonald refers to the space outside his home or office as the “outdoor insane asylum,” where he must assume “that any person that I run into is insane” unless the person proves otherwise.
Some of the threats posed by coronavirus hysteria can be reduced by removing tyrannical governors and mayors and electing pro-liberty candidates, McDonald maintained, “but we need a virtuous populace as well, not just a virtuous governing body.”
“We need a people who believe in and cherish freedom as a virtue, rather than fear. Never before in the history of this country has fear been enshrined as a virtue. If it stays this way and we don’t address it and redress it, we are lost.”
