"Christmas is going to be a lot harder," Joe Biden told an audience in a virtual briefing on December 2.  "I don't want to scare anyone here, but understand the facts.  We're likely to lose another 250,000 people dead between now and January ... because people aren't paying attention."

The purpose of Biden's statements was clearly to scare people into canceling their holiday travel plans and embracing lockdowns, making his opening disclaimer a complete lie.  He certainly aims to provoke panic, but any reasonable person knows that this particular prediction is a desperate attempt at fear-mongering.

Let's be generous and assume that he meant that another 250,000 Americans are "likely" going to die with COVID between December 2 and his assumed inauguration on January 20.  That's 5,000 deaths per day, on average, between December 2 and January 20. 

That's nearly twice as high as the peak of COVID deaths back in April, which was a seven-day rolling average of 2,658.  That number is roughly 46 percent higher than the current average of 1,839.  To get to the number of deaths that Biden predicted, there will need to be a rapid spike of over 3,100 deaths per day, and the deaths would need to stay there or higher, consistently, for the remainder of that 50-day window to approach 250,000 deaths.  This is in spite of the much greater understanding of the virus today, along with much better treatment options, than we had in April.

Biden's purposefully exaggerated and dark prediction, thankfully, isn't "likely" to happen at all.  What's more, Americans all know it.  That's why they traveled for Thanksgiving and will travel for Christmas, too. 

That's a problem for the media and progressives, because they like to imagine the American people to be children who can't be trusted with access to the cookie jar, and that's why, for their own good, daddy government and mommy media need to hide it from time to time.  Their credibility in arguing for that authority as it relates to COVID guidance, however, is becoming an ever more distant memory.

In spite of the fear-mongering from the media and the nanny state, the vast majority of Americans believe they can manage the risks of COVID without the nanny state's supervision.  Perhaps that's because we're wise to the illusion being presented to us.  The sensational number of reported "cases" do not, in fact, meet the criteria for "cases" as prescribed by the CDC.  We're simply being presented positive tests as if the number of positive tests were tantamount to the number of people sick and suffering from COVID.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  

A far more important number than the fake "cases" being thrown at us is the mortality rate, which has been steadily falling since April, now one third of what it was then.  No serious person can dispute this, and Americans can see it clearly with their own eyes.     

Most importantly, the American people also recognize that there are other risks that the media and progressive fear-mongers don't care about, but which are equally important to us as individuals and families.  As such, we are inclined to individually weigh and prioritize the management of these risks.

The prospect of taking the new vaccine is a good example of how these risks may be individually measured and approached, and especially since there appears to be no certainty about whether or not a vaccinated person can later transmit the virus.  For my immediate family and me, if we haven't already had COVID and happen to get it in the future, we have a 99.98-plus-percent chance of surviving the incident. 

In short, we have no reason to live in any great fear of this virus.  Why, exactly, should my family and I inject a foreign substance containing many chemicals, along with a dead form of this virus (hopefully dead, anyway, as a harmful and rushed government-sanctioned vaccine containing a live virus would not be unprecedented in America), in hopes of staving off the threat it presents to us?  Those who wish to have the vaccine certainly can, and should, take it.  But why should the government, or anyone else, for that matter, require that we jab needles into our arms and inject a hastily concocted substance that presents unknown probabilities of encountering unknown risks?  It makes little sense.

The fact that I'm more seriously pondering the prospect of mandatory vaccination than I would have in the past is because of another dangerous risk the media and progressives haven't wanted to weigh against the presumed benefits of COVID lockdowns, and that is the obvious erosion of our liberty that we've witnessed this year. 

You undoubtedly know a local small business or restaurant that closed in recent months and isn't coming back.  Maybe the owner invested his life savings in the business and dedicated thousands of hours toward making it his livelihood.  Maybe that business provided not only for his family, but for other families in the community.  Was the trading of their liberty for the prospect of maybe preventing someone else from getting an extremely survivable virus worth it in the end?

It depends upon your perspective, perhaps, but you cannot argue that there was a distinct weighing of risks involved, and a tradeoff was decided upon.  And whereas the decisions for the owner to remain open and for customers to continue patronizing the store would have been voluntary decisions by all parties involved, the decision to close the store and starve it out of existence was nothing less than coercive tyranny by a government institution that prioritized those risks without the consent of the many parties involved.

And now, Joe Biden is presenting the outrageous and dark fantasies that robbed us of our liberty this year as "likely" possibilities, hectoring the public about not taking him or the "experts" seriously when they say you can't visit your family for the holidays? 

Once again, there are risks in both paths that must be weighed this Christmas. 

On the one hand, you can forgo your happiness this holiday season in the hopes that you may not pass or contract a virus you likely don't have, and for which the vast majority of those exposed to it are extraordinarily likely to survive.  You are free to take that path.

Or, alternatively, you can live your life to the fullest, knowing that none of us is guaranteed a tomorrow and that each moment in life is precious.  You can choose to spend the time that we have remaining on this Earth as happy and free Americans, celebrating the miracle that we are blessed to be alive for a short while longer with those whom we love, and whom we may not have the opportunity to see and hug again next year at the Christmas table.

Sorry, Joe.  To paraphrase frontier legend Davy Crockett, you and your fear-mongering cronies can all go to hell.  This Christmas, I'm getting on a plane and going to be with my family in Texas.