In order to enforce extreme and scientifically unsupportable policies ostensibly aimed at slowing the spread of the Wuhan virus but in reality geared towards aggrandizing power to the government, many governments have set up what can only be deemed ‘snitch’ hotlines. These give your local neighborhood Karen the ability to rat out to authorities anyone who they think…or who they want to claim…violated one of the ‘social distancing’ policies.

Make no mistake about it, this is a tactic as old a totalitarianism. During the French Revolution, an anonymous denunciation to one of the local ‘committees’ would send you to the guillotine. In Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Bloc and Communist China and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, children were encouraged to inform on parents — children who did so were held up to their classmates as heroes — and family members rewarded for turning in kinsmen and friends to their executioners. The motive here was simple: traditional loyalties between parent and child, husband and wife, kinsmen, neighbors were irretrievably broken and replaced with one loyalty — to the state.

One such location was St. Louis County, Missouri, where the county government created an on-line snitch form and dedicated snitch email address to let the Karens get their rocks off by siccing the authorities on people who refused to do what was right. It seemed to work, in a little over a week, those channels received more than 900 tips from the public, mostly from employees and family members of employees informing on employers…those would be the people who provided livelihood to the informers

Sometimes, though, citizens fight back.

Like many states, Missouri has a so-called ‘Sunshine Law’ that makes most government records open to the public. If you used St. Louis’s snitch site you might have noticed the fine print:

“I have been advised that this form and any other communication may be considered an open record pursuant to the Sunshine Law, Chapter 610 RSMo. St. Louis County may be required to release this form as well as other communications as a matter of law upon request by any member of the public, including the media.”

Then the fun started:

The Facebook post headline said, “Here ya go. The gallery of snitches, busybodies, and employees who rat out their own neighbors and employers over the Panic-demic.”

A person whose Facebook profile name is Jared Totsch told the I-Team that he posted the documents knowing that there might be consequences for the people named within.

“If they are worried about retaliation, they should have read the fine print which stated their tips would be open public record subject to a Sunshine request, and should not have submitted tips in that manner to begin with,” wrote Totsch. “I released the info in an attempt to discourage such behavior in the future.”

Totsch declined a phone or video interview. When asked how he felt about the possibility that someone who reported a business might lose their job, Totsch wrote, “I’d call it poetic justice, instant Karma, a dose of their own medicine. What goes around, comes around. They are now experiencing the same pain that they themselves helped to inflict on those they filed complaints against.”

KSDK’s video includes an interview by Karen, uh, Patricia, and she’s concerned:

That’s exactly the attitude that has Patricia concerned now.

“I’m not only worried about COVID, I’m worried about someone showing up at my door, showing up at my workplace or me getting fired for doing what is right,” she said.

There are two takeaways from this. The very fact that the state has to encourage neighbors turning on each other shows that no one believes the regulations have any effect and about the same number of people see the Wuhan virus as a threat. Both of those points of view are heavily supported by the body of scientific evidence. The second point is that the people who are training to be police state informers are ashamed of what they are doing and know that it is wrong but they just can’t help themselves. They were raised to be good little Stasi and that’s what they are. She’s afraid of being confronted by people with no power but she’s perfectly content in anonymously having others confronted by people with police powers.

If our liberties are to survive we must not only go after the politicians pushing this idiocy, we need to make the social cost of playing along too high to let any but the most degraded types of people play along.