People here in Southern Illinois are suing Governor Pritzker for extending his stay-at-home order that’s based entirely on the situation in Chicago (or, rather, what the situation in Chicago was weeks ago) and is destroying the downstate economy where we have very low COVID numbers.
Pritzker responded by saying counties with the highest per capita numbers of deaths are located right here in Southern Illinois, and he’s trying to protect us from dying.
The counties he named have 2 and 10 deaths respectively. All but two of them in nursing homes.
He didn’t lie because per capita the numbers are, indeed, higher than other extremely low numbers we have state-wide. (We have 50 deaths per day for the whole state). But the half-truth is obviously extremely manipulative.
And here’s the kicker. I know people who are college professors who didn’t even think about checking what he said. They are now bleating all over social media that the situation in Southern Illinois is dire and we are all about to diiiiiiiieeeeee.
I guess the biggest revelation to me in this whole thing was how blindly Americans trust the authorities. I’m from the USSR, so for me there’s no such thing as trusting a politician. If a politician says “good morning,” I’ll triple check to see if it’s actually morning and will conclude that the darn bastard us lying anyway.