Uh - the door-to-door phase of this census is over, or nearly so; they canvassed my neighborhood early last spring. It’s a stupid, completely unnecessary exercise - recording GPS coordinates of addresses - that could have easily been accomplished by using Google Maps or similar tools to complete 99.99% of the task, and then mopping up the tiny fraction left over with the street walkers.

But that wouldn’t have landed the company that produced the most primitive, impossible to use GPS units the earth has ever seen with a sweet government contract.

But I digress. The point is that going forward, the only thing that’s left is the actual census, and the vast majority of people just get that in the mail, fill it out and mail it back. Actual face-to-face visits by census workers are exceedingly rare. So I’m not seeing the point of all this hullabaloo - for most of the population, chances of even seeing a census worker are between slim and none.

Where things are going to get dicey is in that small fraction of home visits, nearly all of which are follow ups on addresses that didn’t respond in the first place. These are often visits to crazy people, and ginning up fear among those most likely to go nutzoid at a knock on the door is the height of irresponsibility.

It isn’t the citizenry that’s at risk because of the census - it’s the census workers. The only explanation for this sort of bullshit I can think of is to make sure that some of those workers get their heads blown off when they knock on the door of someone who’s spent way too much time absorbing this bilge.