Oscar-nominated screenwriter and world-renowned playwright David Mamet lamented how the United States has forgotten its own constitution in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking with Alex Marlow of Breitbart News, Mamet said that the pandemic has created an unprecedented historical crisis.
“It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s the first time in history that an entire economy has been shut down because of an infection,” he said. “And obviously everyone gets to pick his or her own experts and say whom they believe in. But that’s what you’re supposed to do with your health, right? We’re supposed to make our own decisions about our health.”
Mamet compared this with feminists who rage about bodily autonomy.
“Now that can be argued either way, just as the virus can be argued either way. But the argument and the terms under which we undertake it are the essence of American democracy,” he said.
Mamet lamented that the West has essentially committed suicide, fueled by the citizenry’s “capacity to be sheep.”
“What we’re seeing is a populace that’s gone nuts and I’ve got a new book coming out called Journal of the Plague Year where I try to reason my way through the way that the west is committing suicide,” he said. “What we’re doing to commit suicide is we’ve forgotten the Constitution.”
“Basically, we human beings have the capacity to be sheep. If we don’t believe in God and if we don’t believe in our country, we’re going to believe in any mumbo jumbo that comes along. And by the time we look around, it’s too late,” he added.
Mamet’s comments follow an op-ed he wrote for The Wall Street Journal earlier this month in which he strongly criticized the expert class and its penchant for pushing lockdowns.
“The virus here is government — or at least the incompetents who advise our rulers and cannot admit the legitimacy of dissension. Absent intervention, this virus may eventually kill the host organism,” Mamet wrote.
While Mamet had grace for officials who make mistakes, he emphasized that such mistakes never get corrected or acknowledged when proven damaging.
“We all have to trust others for their expertise, and we all make mistakes. The horror of a command economy is not that officials will make mistakes, but that those mistakes will never be acknowledged or corrected,” he wrote.
The playwright noted that experts have issued contradictory messages about the effectiveness of masks, citing the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine that published an article saying masks are useless outside health care facilities, only to issue a quasi-retraction.
He also cited the example of a friend who owns a restaurant and is going broke. “One is ‘permitted’ to sit at his tables and eat without a mask. Indeed, how would one eat while wearing one? Does the virus know that one is sitting down?”
After citing numerous examples throughout history of “experts” who made costly mistakes and never paid the price – including Stalin’s science adviser Trofim Lysenko, whose idea of growing winter crops contributed to mass starvation in Soviet Russia – Mamet then took a jab at those pushing climate change.
“Now we have climate change and its attendant alarmists. The news media, backed by those parts of the ‘scientific community’ the media chose to honor, presented this analysis as though it were indisputable fact. In fact, it was riddled with problems,” noted Mamet.