“We’re opening up our country again,” President Donald Trump told reporters [Tuesday] before departing for Arizona. He also helpfully clarified that operating without shutdowns doesn’t mean citizens do nothing to prevent the spread of infection. In response to a question on the latest virus mortality guess floated in the national media, the President said, “we’re doing a lot of mitigation. And, frankly, when the people report back, they’re going to be social distancing and they’re going to be washing their hands, and they’re going to be doing the things that you’re supposed to do.”
Governors in places like New Jersey and New York are still locking down much of society, despite a flattened virus curve. But nationwide the lockdowners are losing public support. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports today via email:
Today’s Number of the Day presented by Ballotpedia shows that 49% of voters nationwide now fear the economic threat from the coronavirus more than the health threat. Forty-five percent (45%) take the opposite view and are more worried about the health threat. These numbers reflect a significant change over the past month. In late March, by a 55% to 38% margin, voters were more concerned about the health threat…
These results are consistent with other data showing that people are looking to loosen some of the restrictions. Voters nationwide are evenly divided as to whether the lockdowns should continue. And, they have come to recognize that it’s not simply a question of stay home to stay safe or go out and get sick. Voters recognize there are significant mental and physical health risks associated with ongoing lockdowns. Those who know the latest data are more likely to support easing lockdown restrictions.
Even in New Jersey the risks and costs are manifest. On Friday Tracey Tully reported in the New York Times on Jean Wickham and her family, who live in the country’s second-richest state:
The Wickhams’ minivan was one of thousands of vehicles that snaked as far as the eye could see one morning last week in Egg Harbor, N.J., 10 miles west of Atlantic City. The promise of fresh produce and a 30-pound box of canned food, pasta and rice from a food bank drew so many cars that traffic was snarled for nearly a mile in three directions, leading to five accidents, the police said.
“I’m just afraid I’m going to lose my house,” said Ms. Wickham, who lives in Egg Harbor. “I feel like a failure right now.”
… Lines at a food pantry in Summit, an affluent commuter town in northern New Jersey, stretch around the block every Tuesday evening. A food bank on the Jersey Shore has started a text service to give new users a discreet way to seek help.
Significantly west of the New York Times, the similarly-named York News-Times covers an area in eastern Nebraska. Melanie Wilkinson describes a similar phenomenon:
The Food Bank of Lincoln and members of the Nebraska National Guard distributed free food to York area residents last Friday…
The need was quite apparent as the line of cars stretched for blocks and blocks as more than 220 households received food…While the Food Bank provides this service in York on a monthly basis, this latest food event was met with much greater response than past distributions.
More news from Washington brings hope that a revival will soon be permitted nationwide. Andrew Restuccia reports in the Journal:
Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump administration is having internal conversations about phasing out the White House’s coronavirus task force…
The task force’s doctors will continue to advise President Trump on his handling of the pandemic, administration officials said.
Another optimistic note today comes via email from Dan Clifton of Strategas Research:
The political debate about whether states should re-open is blocking out the facts that states, run by governors of both parties, are opening up their economies gradually. This is not just a few Republican states, and it is happening faster than the consensus expects. Governors of both parties see declining cases, falling tax revenues, hospitals with spare capacity, and restless businesses and consumers. The addition of new therapeutics and the scaling up of testing have also helped build momentum for the re-opening.
Writing from Dallas this week, Don Luskin of Trend Macrolytics reports: “Joy and renewal are palpably in the air. We wish all our clients and friends the patience and good health to endure what we hope are the final throes of the Covid-19 crisis, and the resiliency to enjoy a speedy re-opening.”
He adds that as economies reopen, “The early adopters will be the healthy young, who have probably chafed the most under the boring and repressive rigors of lockdown, and who – it is now becoming known – are largely invulnerable to Covid-2019 anyway.” Mr. Luskin predicts:
FOCI (fear of Covid infection) will be replaced by FOMO (fear of missing out).
Readers have by now learned to be skeptical of predictions about the virus, but are no doubt hoping Mr. Luskin is right on target.
Category: US politics
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No comments on The lockdown breakouts
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Michael Smith:
This COVID-19 pandemic response is what happens when progressive policies collide with natural law, the natural law being that viruses exist, they mutate and they infect humans — all the time, every day.
“Stay at home” policies aren’t a medical procedure, they are behavioral controls that delay the inevitable — unless and until medical science catches up to the virus.
Think about this — these policies offer Americans a dichotomy — allegedly designed to quell fear while also inciting it. For a majority of Americans, these policies convert rational, reasonable fear into irrational and unreasonable fear … and do not dismiss that there are people who hold totally reasonable fears about contracting COVID-19 due to their own personal risk assessments. I do not deny that.
But it sure seems the policies to which we have been subjected have been based on many contradictions.
I’ve said it many times and am seeing it play out every day — reasonable fear plus bad logic equals crippling unease but starting from a basis of unreasonable, irrational fear plus bad logic equals disaster.
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Although both groups live in the same country, conservatives and liberals in the U.S. do not seem to be experiencing the same COVID-19 pandemic. Liberals are very concerned about the disease; conservatives are comparatively apathetic.
This fact is puzzling because a long history of research in social psychology suggests that conservatives ought to be more worried than liberals about threatening diseases. Indeed, decades of research ties conservatism to threat sensitivity more broadly, and meta-analyses of dozens of studies reveal that conservatism is higher in societies with greater levels of disease threat.
So why on earth don’t conservatives seem especially threatened by a worldwide pandemic? In a set of three studies, my colleagues and I investigated this question. We considered two possibilities. First, might conservatives actually be less threatened by the current pandemic? After all, the pandemic has thus far tended to hit more liberal regions, like New York, harder than more conservative regions. It is therefore possible that conservative and liberal differences are driven by a divergence in actual experiences with COVID-19. Perhaps the roles would have been reversed if the original U.S. epicenter had been Houston instead of New York City.
Two of the three counties that have the most cases in Wisconsin are Milwaukee and Dane counties. Perhaps instead of calling Milwaukee and Madison the Axis of Evil, I should call them the Axis of Disease.
Or, perhaps conservatives and liberals are viewing the pandemic through different ideological lenses – lenses that bias their perceptions of the pandemic’s potential threat. Decades of research indicate that people often see what they hope to see. It is possible, then, that liberals’ and conservatives’ political commitments have shaped their beliefs about the threat of COVID-19. For example, it could be that Trump’s initial casual attitude toward the virus created a motivation among Republicans to downplay the severity of the threat, or created a motivation among Democrats to amplify the seriousness of the threat. Thus, the ideological match between pre-existing political goals and perceptions of the pandemic’s effects on those goals, rather than differences in actual experiences and observations of the consequences of the virus, may explain the apparent disagreement about its severity.
To investigate, we created and factor analyzed measurements of how threatening people perceived COVID-19 to be, desired political outcomes related to COVID-19 (such as the degree to which they wanted the government to enforce social distancing), and the extent to which they had been affected by COVID-19. Participants also completed standard measurements of political ideology. Using modern mediational analyses, we examined whether the relationship between political ideology and perceived COVID-19 threat was better explained by participants’ political lens (how their pre-existing political beliefs interfaced with COVID-19) than by their actual experiences (how they have been affected directly by COVID-19).
The results were striking. We found little evidence that different experiences with COVID-19 account for liberals’ and conservatives’ different views of the pandemic. Instead, participants’ desired political outcomes more consistently accounted for ideological differences in disease threat perception. The figure below reports the indirect effects for both political beliefs and experiences across our three studies. These indirect effects are measurements of the degree to which the relationship between political ideology and perceived COVID-19 threat is accounted for by (a) desired political outcomes related to COVID-19 or (b) participants’ exposure to or experiences with the effects of the disease. As clearly indicated, it is participants’ political desires – and not their level of experience or exposure – that account for the different threats liberals and conservatives assign to COVID-19.
What kinds of ideological goals were most important in explaining conservatives’ relative apathy toward COVID-19? Out of six, the strongest effects emerged for goals that involved government-imposed social distancing rules. Conservatives oppose the government telling them when they can or cannot leave their homes; liberals support such policies. Because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that conservatives dislike, conservatives appear motivated to downplay the severity. Or conversely, because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that liberals do like, liberals seem motivated to magnify the threat. Note that our results cannot say which of these is happening in greater measure.
Thus, it is these ideological lenses – and not direct experiences – that appear to explain better liberals’ and conservatives’ different views of the pandemic. In a sense, the proverbial cart may be driving the proverbial horse: rather than the actual threat of the disease influencing political policy preferences, political policy preferences are influencing perceptions of disease threat.
Our findings suggest that this pandemic might drive an already-divided nation even further apart. However, our results also offer a path by which the pandemic could ultimately bring ideological groups closer together. We found that the general effect of ideology on perceived COVID-19 threat significantly decreased at higher levels of experience with COVID-19. Conservatives view the disease as less threatening than liberals, but this difference shrinks among participants who have been more impacted by the disease. Thus, although a lack of experience did not account for conservatives’ lower threat perceptions, the more experience they had, the less their own ideological goals mattered. As the effects of the disease grow, then, ideological groups’ attitudes toward the disease may start to merge.
Unless they don’t. Conservatives, not liberals, have been pointing out far more often that only one-fifth of Wisconsinites who have tested positive for COVID-19 have been ill enough to be hospitalized, and that the death rate of COVID-19 among those who have tested positive is 4 percent, and likely to drop as testing expands and more people who test positive for COVID-19 but haven’t had symptoms are found. A large number of conservatives seem to view COVID-19 as something we may have to learn to live with, while the prevailing liberal view seems to be that COVID-19 is something that must be fought at any price. (As in, according to one conservative, $890,560 per COVID-19 diagnoses, and $21.57 million per COVID-19 death.)
It shouldn’t be a surprise that political worldviews would affect people’s view of the pandemic. People who believe in an expansive (and expanding) role of government in people’s lives would naturally see this as the perfect opportunity to control people’s movements and behavior. There are some conservatives who believe this as well, but only from their own views of what government should control. The libertarian view is that government needs to stay out of our lives beyond a bare minimum, and certainly stay-at-home orders are not anyone’s idea of “the bare minimum.”
There is another missing component here. Conservatives are more likely than liberals to be religious, and to have church (which has been mostly banned nationwide) as a central part of their lives. Religious people should believe that God is in charge regardless of what happens here on Earth, and that regardless of what happens to ourselves or our loved ones there is a better world after this irredeemably flawed one. Liberals (and, I hate to observe, church leadership) seem to lack faith.
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Daniel Greenfield starts with the perspective of skepticism about the media (which is a reasonable attitude) but then …
Even while the media is blaring stories about the abuse of the Payroll Protection Plan loans from the Small Business Administration, its own industry took millions in loans and wants billions more.
Unlike many small businesses which were forced to shut down because of the lockdown, the media has been wrongly listed as ‘essential’ and exempted from the shutdowns, but that hasn’t stopped it from taking money that should have been used to compensate small business owners who can’t stay open.
It should be noted that “the media has been wrongly listed as ‘essential’ and exempted from the shutdowns” is, in order, an opinion and a statement that varies depending on where you are.
Even when the media operations cashing in on the SBA loans aren’t anyone’s idea of a small business.
The Seattle Times maxed out its PPP loan with a $10 million payout. The Seattle Times is not only Washington State’s largest daily, but its parent company, the Seattle Times Company, owns two other papers, and had, as recently as 3 years ago, put out 7 papers. It also owned multiple newspapers in Maine which it sold off for over $200 million. It had two printing plants, one of which it sold. The Rotary Offset Press, which it still owns, continues to print a variety of magazines and newspapers.
But while the Seattle Times is, like the New York Times, a multi-generational family property, the McClatchy Company owns 49.5% of voting stock and 70.6% of voting stock in the Seattle Times Company. McClatchy has dozens of papers and had revenues of over $800 million in 2018.
While McClatchy has operated at a loss and filed for Chapter 11, it’s not a small business. Neither is the hedge fund likely to run it which is partially backed by, among others, CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest and most politically correct pension fund in the country.
Is this really a small business?
Despite the façade of family ownership, national chains have owned much of the Seattle paper business since the Great Depression with McClatchy taking over from Knight Ridder. Even if you ignore all the wizards behind the Emerald City paper’s curtain, the Seattle Times Company has 849 employees.
How was the Seattle Times able to max out the SBA’s PPP loan? Double and triple standards.If you deal in fresh fruit and have over 100 employees, according to the SBA, you’re not a small business. If you supply toys, you’re limited to 150 employees. But if you’re a newspaper publisher, you can have up to 1,000 employees and still be considered a small business.
That’s how a company that owns 3 papers, a printing plant, and its silent partner is one of the largest news publishers in America, was eligible to grab loans intended to keep small businesses afloat.
The Seattle Times wasn’t unique among the media in seizing loans meant for shuttered small businesses.
The Tampa Bay Times got an $8.5 million loan, close to the max. The Times Publishing Company also puts out 10 papers, a few magazines, and Politifact, a site which claims to ‘fact check’ politicians, but frequently makes false claims, puts out spam, and smears conservatives.
The Company is owned by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which is funded by leftist billionaires like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar.
And just to make matters worse, the Poynter Institute, which is officially a non-profit, also got a stimulus loan of $737,400 to cover its coronavirus “business losses”.
Poynter notes that as, “a nonprofit with under 60 employees, Poynter qualified for the loan.” But Poynter’s documents suggest that its newspaper business had $123 million in revenues with assets of $43 million.
That’s not a small business.
The Tampa Bay Times and its shady operations, the intermingling of non-profits and for-profits, is already suspect on its own. It should not have been taking money meant for small businesses.
But the media has been eager to pig out on small business loans even as it attacks public companies that took PPP loans. Axios, a media venture by Politico bigwigs, with around 200 employees, funded by venture capital and investment firms, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood tycoon with a net worth of $750 million, and NBCUniversal, scored a $5 million PPP loan.
But this obscene piggery isn’t enough for the media which wants a much bigger exemption.
Senator Maria Cantwell, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and Senator John Kennedy dispatched a letter urging a waiver on the affiliation rule “which restricts assistance to companies owned or controlled by larger entities.” This would potentially allow huge multi-billion-dollar conglomerates like Gannett to raid money intended for small businesses even as they lobby politicians to shut those businesses down.
The senators falsely claimed that keeping the media going was “essential to public health”.
Affiliation waivers would lift the 1,000-employee limit and allow newspapers owned by national chains to apply for loans as if they were small businesses. It’s the equivalent of having every Starbucks outlet claim that it’s just a small business serving the local community and won’t pass the money upward.
The media has been shaming other corporations that took PPP loans, yet it is entirely without shame.
There ought to be no more sanctimonious lectures about corporate bailouts from Democrats who want to bail out billion-dollar corporations while small business owners can’t get inside the front door. If affiliation rules are waived for the media, Gannett’s thousand plus newspapers would be ready to raid the SBA for loans that would likely never be repaid, while justifying the looting by arguing that the media is suffering because small businesses can’t afford to take out as many ads in local papers as before.
The media has already managed to loot at least $23.5 million meant for small businesses. Affiliation waivers would turn PPP loans into a bailout for media conglomerates that would be worth billions.
The media has already been allowed to operate while actual small businesses were shut down, even though there’s been a coronavirus infection spike in the media which, as far as we know, killed several people.
Evidence?
It’s used its megaphone to push for more shutdowns of local businesses as non-essential even as it demands the right to raid the money intended for those businesses to fund its massive operations.
Enough.
National media chains on the verge of bankruptcy want to exploit small business loans intended for coronavirus relief to keep their broken business model going for another few years before they fold.
The PPP loan program was not designed as a bailout for media giants and their pension fraud.
The Seattle Times, the Tampa Bay Times, Poynter, and Axios ought to be pressured into returning the money they took. And while that may never happen, any effort by politicians to apply affiliation waivers to the media ought to be fought as an obscene cash grab from small businesses to lefty corporations.
It is a good question to ask why businesses of five to 10 employees haven’t been able to give PPP loans while much larger “small” businesses have.
To say, though, that every media outlet is the same is false. To assert that no one needs reporters delving into what their local governments are doing with their tax dollars is ignorant and foolish.
On Giving Tuesday yesterday the Poynter Institute posted:
Today on #GivingTuesdayNow we humbly urge you to consider a gift to support the journalists in your community working tirelessly and at personal risk to help you navigate the COVID-19 health and economic crisis. We are grateful for their skill in providing useful, reliable information about all aspects of the pandemic in these times of confusion and social stress. We need them to continue to tell the stories of the sick, the dying, the health care heroes and those working to move us forward. The value of this journalism is immense.
Your dollars, if you can swing it, are deeply appreciated, particularly given the economic pressures faced by local news companies.
But how about something even better? Don’t just give. Engage.
Buy a subscription to your local news website or newspaper. Become a sustaining member of the local public radio or television station, or your favorite nonprofit news website. If you have the option to patronize an advertiser who spends money with a local news source, please consider. You know what’s better than journalism supporters? Customers.
When the audience has skin in the game, there is an implicit compact with the journalists that together we can help improve a community. Such engagement runs deeper than just the money. We’ve long said journalism helps us participate in democracy.
When the coronavirus hit, local news organizations were already at-risk with “underlying health conditions.” The fragmentation and even evaporation of advertising revenue long before the pandemic forced significant retrenchment and left the local news industry with an uncertain future.
With revenue in freefall, publishers were forced to significantly cut costs, including news coverage, while asking the audience to pay more for the product. That’s a hard balancing act, for sure.
A byproduct of the tension has been an unhealthy indifference. According to a study by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, 86% of Americans believe in the value of local news, yet only 20%paid for a subscription or membership to a local news organization. Even those who say they value journalism are becoming bystanders, and in the process settling for a weak sauce of coverage, at times, from their preferred local news source.
The Knight study found more than 60% of Americans believe their community news sources aren’t doing enough to keep an eye on local officials. They want more coverage of education, drug addiction and housing.
A report last year by the nonprofit education news site Chalkbeat said there were no full-time education beat writers in locales as big and complicated as Newark or throughout the communities of Silicon Valley. Might not more paying customers demand better?
Today’s newsroom leaders have a deeply difficult task in covering their communities with substantially fewer journalists than before. But how the remaining resources do get deployed is a choice.
Combine your patronage with engagement — write letters, leave comments, attend events, call in story tips — and you become part of the equation in making the choices mean the most for your community.
The coverage of coronavirus by local journalists has struck a blow against indifference. Today we recognize the exceptional energy, relevance and sophistication that journalists have brought to the crisis and its consequences. Every member of a local news company is serving their community. …
An enduring theme of American journalism is that it helps move us off the sidelines, get involved, demand action. In these confusing times of crisis, it’s useful to remember that journalism is part of the democracy toolkit, and we need not feel powerless.
I wish I could endorse 100 percent of that statement. But too many in the media refuse to admit that their previous work might not have been connecting with their readers. (Recall my list of reporter engagement, or lack thereof, where they work.) The problems of the media are not merely due to shrinking advertising base or corporate ownership, even though advertising has been shrinking thanks to the Internet, and the managers of big media companies don’t always make the right decisions.
There has, for one thing, been too much commentary (in print or online, particularly on Twitter) from reporters whose commentary brings into question their objectivity. The corollary is the arrogance of some reporters who bristle whenever they are questioned by their readers. (That may be more a personality flaw than a flaw in the profession. Everyone needs thicker skins, including reporters, who you’d think would be immune to the slings and arrows of contrary comment.)
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Regardless of how the Legislature’s lawsuit against the Evers administration, with arguments before the state Supreme Court scheduled for today, turns out (and never be optimistic about politics), no governor should the power to declare emergencies upon his or her whim without legislative approval.
Illinois state Sen. Dan McConchie:
As governors across the country destroy their states’ economies in the name of public health, there is shockingly little oversight of their actions.
In my state of Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has locked down the state, closing swaths of commerce and limiting the movement of citizens in response to Covid-19. These actions have been challenged in court by my colleague, state Rep. Darren Bailey, and a judge initially agreed to a temporary restraining order on the governor’s emergency measure, but only as they apply to Mr. Bailey. The rest of the state remains under lockdown by the governor’s orders, which continue without oversight.
Normally, the three coequal branches of government impose checks and balances to ensure accountability. Power is divided to allow recourse if one branch grows too intrusive or authoritarian. And while many people have sued governors in recent weeks to demand judicial redress, the judicial branch is reactive in nature, usually declining to disrupt legally plausible actions during a crisis. The legislative branch is a far better source of timely restraint.
Yet in 41 states there is little or no legislative input on gubernatorial state-of-emergency proclamations. Half those legislatures lack the ability to block any exercise of a governor’s power when done in the name of an emergency. That leaves elected representatives unable to defend their constituents against executive overreach.
While virtually all governors have issued a state of emergency limiting commerce or freedom of movement, only two states, Georgia and Oklahoma, require any affirmative action of the legislature to approve the governor’s initial declaration. Seven others require legislative approval of subsequent extensions after an initial emergency declaration expires. Twenty-two have neither of these powers, though the legislature may nullify an emergency declaration once made.
That leaves 19 states, including Illinois, where an emergency declaration that closes private business, restricts commerce and limits the free movement of residents has no limits at all.
Consider the questionable decisions of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who banned the sale of “nonessential” items such as furniture, carpeting and paint. That applied even in stores that were allowed to open. It remains unexplained how cherry picking what customers can and can’t buy at Home Depot limits the spread of coronavirus any better than, say, simply limiting the number of shoppers allowed in at any one time.
Here in Illinois, some of Gov. Pritzker’s limits on commerce can hardly be defended as “based in science.” Even under his latest Executive Order released Thursday, I can visit Target to buy furniture, Walmart to buy clothing or my grocery store to buy flowers. But I can’t go inside a furniture store, a clothing store or a florist, even though those stores could easily adopt the same safety measures required of the retail outlets permitted to stay open.
These arbitrary rules are inconvenient for the public, but more important, they crush the economic backbone of American communities—small business. Thousands, if not millions, of jobs may be lost nationwide because of some of the unchecked, myopic decision-making behind the total lockdowns.
The issue isn’t whether any particular governor is doing a good job during this unprecedented crisis. It’s that many governors have adopted a decision-making process that abandons one of America’s greatest strengths: diversity. The American system of government has led to the greatest creation of wealth and personal freedom in history because qualitatively better decision-making naturally results when disparate viewpoints are empowered at the governing table. The lack of legislative input in gubernatorial emergency declarations will surely result in more economic devastation and personal harm than is necessary to protect each other and defeat the virus.
Voters and legislatures alike are concerned about the exclusion of their voices from public affairs. Despite many legislatures not being in session due to the pandemic, states such as Delaware, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Utah have introduced bills to curb gubernatorial authority regarding their emergency declarations. In the Illinois Senate, I have introduced a bill to require legislative authorization for renewal of emergency powers after the initial 30-day state-of-emergency declaration. This would leave the governor able to respond quickly to an emergency, but require him to justify the sustained exercise of that authority by submitting it to the periodic examination and approval of elected legislators.
This is exactly the kind of oversight enacted in Oklahoma when the legislature approved Gov. Kevin Stitt’s initial emergency declaration in early April. While the legislature agreed to give the governor broad power to respond to the Covid-19 crisis, it inserted language requiring advance notice before the governor suspends state statutes or regulations, and vowed broad transparency before the public on such matters. The legislature also must reapprove the governor’s declaration every 30 days and can vote to suspend it at any time.
Involvement by state legislatures in a crisis provides a potent, necessary check on centralized emergency authority. Legislative agreement requires the broad approval that facilitates the best decision-making. Making sure emergency directives are clearly defensible and widely supported helps limit the disruptions of life and violations of liberty citizens are forced to endure.
Our system of checks and balances between the branches of government is a source of strength and vitality during normal times. It is especially vital during a long crisis when the cost of emergency action is so high for so many.
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Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type – ran an in-depth article of the problems free speech pose to American society in the coronavirus era. The headline:
Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal
In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.
Authored by a pair of law professors from Harvard and the University of Arizona, Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, the piece argued that the American and Chinese approaches to monitoring the Internet were already not that dissimilar:
Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices… But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.
They went on to list all the reasons that, given that we’re already on an “inexorable” path to censorship, a Chinese-style system of speech control may not be such a bad thing. In fact, they argued, a benefit of the coronavirus was that it was waking us up to “how technical wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do enormous public good.”
Perhaps, they posited, Americans could be moved to reconsider their “understanding” of the First and Fourth Amendments, as “the harms from digital speech” continue to grow, and “the social costs of a relatively open Internet multiply.”
This interesting take on the First Amendment was the latest in a line of “Let’s rethink that whole democracy thing” pieces that began sprouting up in earnest four years ago. Articles with headlines like “Democracies end when they become too democratic” and “Too much of a good thing: why we need less democracy” became common after two events in particular: Donald Trump’s victory in the the Republican primary race, and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU, i.e. “Brexit.”
A consistent lament in these pieces was the widespread decline in respect for “experts” among the ignorant masses, better known as the people Trump was talking about when he gushed in February 2016, “I love the poorly educated!”
The Atlantic was at the forefront of the argument that The People is a Great Beast, that cannot be trusted to play responsibly with the toys of freedom. A 2016 piece called “American politics has gone insane” pushed a return of the “smoke-filled room” to help save voters from themselves. Author Jonathan Rauch employed a metaphor that is striking in retrospect, describing America’s oft-vilified intellectual and political elite as society’s immune system:
Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.
The new piece by Goldsmith and Woods says we’re there, made literally sick by our refusal to accept the wisdom of experts. The time for asking the (again, literally) unwashed to listen harder to their betters is over. The Chinese system offers a way out. When it comes to speech, don’t ask: tell.
As the Atlantic lawyers were making their case, YouTube took down a widely-circulated video about coronavirus, citing a violation of “community guidelines.”
The offenders were Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massahi, co-owners of an “Urgent Care” clinic in Bakersfield, California. They’d held a presentation in which they argued that widespread lockdowns were perhaps not necessary, according to data they were collecting and analyzing.
“Millions of cases, small amounts of deaths,” said Erickson, a vigorous, cheery-looking Norwegian-American who argued the numbers showed Covid-19 was similar to flu in mortality rate. “Does [that] necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs, destruction of oil companies, furloughing doctors…? I think the answer is going to be increasingly clear.”
The reaction of the medical community was severe. It was pointed out that the two men owned a clinic that was losing business thanks to the lockdown. The message boards of real E.R. doctors lit up with angry comments, scoffing at the doctors’ dubious data collection methods and even their somewhat dramatic choice to dress in scrubs for their video presentation.
The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) scrambled to issue a joint statement to “emphatically condemn” the two doctors, who “do not speak for medical society” and had released “biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests.”
As is now almost automatically the case in the media treatment of any controversy, the story was immediately packaged for “left” and “right” audiences by TV networks. Tucker Carlson on Fox backed up the doctors’ claims, saying “these are serious people who’ve done this for a living for decades,” and YouTube and Google have “officially banned dissent.”
Meanwhile, over on Carlson’s opposite-number channel, MSNBC, anchor Chris Hayes of the All In program reacted with fury to Carlson’s monologue:
There’s a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the network that we at All In call Trump TV right now to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus… Call it coronavirus trutherism.
Hayes, an old acquaintance of mine, seethed at what he characterized as the gross indifference of Trump Republicans to the dangers of coronavirus. “At the beginning of this horrible period, the president, along with his lackeys, and propagandists, they all minimized what was coming,” he said, sneering. “They said it was just like a cold or the flu.”
He angrily demanded that if Fox acolytes like Carlson believed so strongly that society should be reopened, they should go work in a meat processing plant. “Get in there if you think it’s that bad. Go chop up some pork.”
The tone of the many media reactions to Erickson, Carlson, Trump, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, and others who’ve suggested lockdowns and strict shelter-in-place laws are either unnecessary or do more harm than good, fits with what writer Thomas Frank describes as a new “Utopia of Scolding”:
Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold. That’s their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian’s face, forever.
In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their preoccupations.
Because this Conventional Wisdom viewed itself as being solely concerned with the Only Important Thing, i.e. removing Trump, there was no longer any legitimate excuse for disagreeing with its takes on Russia, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, the 25th amendment, Ukraine, the use of the word “treason,” the removal of Alex Jones, the movie Joker, or whatever else happened to be the #Resistance fixation of the day.
When the Covid-19 crisis struck, the scolding utopia was no longer abstraction. The dream was reality! Pure communism had arrived! Failure to take elite advice was no longer just a deplorable faux pas. Not heeding experts was now murder. It could not be tolerated. Media coverage quickly became a single, floridly-written tirade against “expertise-deniers.” For instance, the Atlantic headline on Kemp’s decision to end some shutdowns was, “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.”
At the outset of the crisis, America’s biggest internet platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit – took an unprecedented step to combat “fraud and misinformation” by promising extensive cooperation in elevating “authoritative” news over less reputable sources.
H.L. Mencken once said that in America, “the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”
We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to combat “ignorance,” the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.
The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant. It’s astonishing that they don’t see this
Journalists are professional test-crammers. Our job is to get an assignment on Monday morning and by Tuesday evening act like we’re authorities on intellectual piracy, the civil war in Yemen, Iowa caucus procedure, the coronavirus, whatever. We actually know jack: we speed-read, make a few phone calls, and in a snap people are inviting us on television to tell millions of people what to think about the complex issues of the world.When we come to a subject cold, the job is about consulting as many people who really know their stuff as quickly as possible and sussing out – often based on nothing more than hunches or impressions of the personalities involved – which set of explanations is most believable. Sportswriters who covered the Deflategate football scandal had to do this in order to explain the Ideal Gas Law, I had to do it to cover the subprime mortgage scandal, and reporters this past January and February had to do it when assigned to assess the coming coronavirus threat.
It does not take that much work to go back and find that a significant portion of the medical and epidemiological establishment called this disaster wrong when they were polled by reporters back in the beginning of the year. Right-wingers are having a blast collecting the headlines, and they should, given the chest-pounding at places like MSNBC about others who “minimized the risk.” Here’s a brief sample:
Get a Grippe, America: The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now: Washington Post
Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread : USA Today
Want to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus? Do the Same Things You Do Every Winter : Time
Here’s my personal favorite, from Wired on January 29:
We should de-escalate the war on coronavirus
There are dozens of these stories and they nearly all contain the same elements, including an inevitable quote or series of quotes from experts telling us to calm the hell down. This is from the Time piece:
“Good hand-washing helps. Staying healthy and eating healthy will also help,” says Dr. Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at New York’s Stony Brook Children’s Hospital. “The things we take for granted actually do work. It doesn’t matter what the virus is. The routine things work.”
There’s a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from priesthoods in any field. It’s particularly in the nature of insular communities of subject matter experts to coalesce around orthodoxies that blind the very people in the loop who should be the most knowledgeable.
“Experts” get things wrong for reasons that are innocent (they’ve all been taught the same incorrect thing in school) and less so (they have a financial or professional interest in denying the truth).
On the less nefarious side, the entire community of pollsters in 2016 denounced as infamous the idea that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, let alone the general election. They believed that because they weren’t paying attention to voters (their ostensible jobs), but also because they’d never seen anything similar. In a more suspicious example, if you asked a hundred Wall Street analysts in September 2008 what caused the financial crisis, probably no more than a handful would have mentioned fraud or malfeasance.
Both of the above examples point out a central problem with trying to automate the fact-checking process the way the Internet platforms have of late, with their emphasis on “authoritative” opinions.
“Authorities” by their nature are untrustworthy. Sometimes they have an interest in denying truths, and sometimes they actually try to define truth as being whatever they say it is. “Elevating authoritative content” over independent or less well-known sources is an algorithmic take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been slowly destroying our business for decades.
The WMD fiasco happened because journalists listened to people with military ranks and titles instead of demanding evidence and listening to their own instincts. The same thing happened with Russiagate, a story fueled by intelligence “experts” with grand titles who are now proven to have been wrong to a spectacular degree, if not actually criminally liable in pushing a fraud.
We’ve become incapable of talking calmly about possible solutions because we’ve lost the ability to decouple scientific or policy discussions, or simple issues of fact, from a political argument. Reporting on the Covid-19 crisis has become the latest in a line of moral manias with Donald Trump in the middle.
Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous. Or we’re politicizing the framing of stories in a way that signals to readers what their take should be before they even digest the material. “Conservative Americans see coronavirus hope in Progressive Sweden,” reads a Politico headline, as if only conservatives should feel optimism in the possibility that a non-lockdown approach might have merit! Are we rooting for such an approach to not work?
From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not the best sources. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.
Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the disease. The scolders who are being seduced by such thinking have to wake up, before we end up adding another disaster on top of the terrible one we’re already facing.
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Vaughn Cordle of Ionosphere Capital:
Refining our research thus far, we have determined that the covid-19 mortality, death and case-fatalities rates are significantly lower than experts and policymakers currently believe. We have estimated the economic costs for various lockdown timelines and when the recovery can be phased in. The point where layoff-related deaths exceed covid-19 lives saved is when we need to consider whether going on will be costlier than going back.
We estimate an average household burden of $33,442 and $27,848 per employed due to the $4.3trn cost to save covid-19-related lives. The shorter the duration of the lockdown, the lower the cost and debt burden on the men and women who make our country great. This debt includes $3.8trn in deficit spending and $27trn in public debt, which, either separately or combined, will result in higher taxes, reduced social spending, lower job growth, GDP and living standards.
Numbers are central tendency estimates which likely will not match actual results. However, they are more than sufficient to make our trade-off argument that covid lives saved should not be exceeded by lives ruined and lives lost.
The cost in human lives
On April 20, University of Washington (Institute of Health Metrics) Professor Ali Mokdad said, “The United States is already past the “peak” in terms of daily covid-19-related deaths.” The IMHE modelers recently revised projected coronavirus-related deaths sharply downward, estimating 60,300 coronavirus-related deaths by early August. The White House had previously said that there might be between 100,000 and 240,000 coronavirus-related deaths even if most people followed strict social distancing guidelines.
Using our estimates, a 31% increase in unemployment (47m) with a lockdown extending through May will result in a doubling of drug overdoses (69,735) and an additional 15,137 suicides. Together, these account for 84,872 layoff-related deaths, in addition to the base-case estimates of 60,300 (with an estimated range of 34,063 to 140,381) coronavirus deaths predicted by the IMHE researchers.
The grim calculus of joblessness
According to data from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Lancet, a medical journal, every one percent hike in unemployment will likely produce a 3.3 percent increase in drug-overdose deaths and a 0.99 percent increase in suicides.
For the year ending February 2019 (NCHS), 69,029 people died of drug overdoses, almost 7 out of 10 the result of opioids. Suicide, the tenth leading cause of death in the United States, accounted for 48,344 deaths (CDC), more than twice the number of homicides (19,510).
Lockdown-related deaths will likely exceed the base-case number of covid-19 deaths by 141%—and this offsets 60% of the highest estimate of 140,381 predicted by IMHE researchers.
The number of layoff-related drug overdoses and suicide deaths will soar as lockdown durations grow, and in tandem with job losses, debt obligations and economic costs.
Our base-case estimate is for 15 million unemployed by the end of 2020, assuming a phased-in recovery starting mid-May. Given the expected recovery, we now estimate 33,743 drug overdoses and 7,324 suicides, which sum to 41,067 layoff-related deaths. While not as grim, it increases the base-case estimate covid-19 deaths by 68%.
We provide additional tables required to validate and support our trade-off conclusions in the following essay: The price of reducing needless deaths versus the price of COVID-19 lives saved: The grim calculus. The series of essays are from a longer covid study.
Although statistics for alcohol layoff-related deaths are not as strong, there is a robust correlation. For people aged 50–65, being unemployed is associated with increased drinking, mood swings, and depression, which highlights the need for prevention policies and interventions and to improve access to treatment services during an economic recession, especially for vulnerable groups such as those facing layoffs in middle age.
Given the lockdown costs in lives and treasury, is it not common sense to say that the U.S. must go back to work, perhaps gradually, in phases. A mid-May unlock would reduce the economic cost by approximately $1.2trn, unemployment by 5.2 million, and reduce layoff-related deaths. If grocery stores and Home Depot can operate safely as essential businesses, so can many others. Like a critically ill patient, the economy cannot be on life support indefinitely. This is especially true when wealth destruction from a prolonged lockdown harms our ability to fund healthcare.
With luck and ingenuity, scientists will develop a vaccine for the world’s people. For America’s economy, getting back to work is the best medicine. The point where layoff-related deaths exceed covid-19 lives saved is when we need to consider whether going on will be costlier than going back.
Note: Donald McGregor’s The Coronavirus: The Health of Our Nation, Our Economy, and Our Liberties, a Delicate Balance is an excellent commentary about the devastating psychosocial impact of a prolonged pandemic lockdown.
As predicted, police calls for domestic incidents are increasing. -
All my life, I have dismissed paranoids on the right (“America is headed to communism”) and the left (“It can happen here”—referring to fascism).
It’s not that I’ve ever believed liberty was guaranteed. Being familiar with history and a pessimist regarding the human condition, I never believed that.
But the ease with which police state tactics have been employed and the equal ease with which most Americans have accepted them have been breathtaking.
People will argue that a temporary police state has been justified because of the allegedly unique threat to life posed by the new coronavirus. I do not believe the data will bear that out. Regardless, let us at least agree that we are closer to a police state than ever in American history.
“Police state” does not mean totalitarian state. America is not a totalitarian state; we still have many freedoms.
In a totalitarian state, this article could not be legally published, and if it were illegally published, I would be imprisoned and/or executed.
But we are presently living with all four of the key hallmarks of a police state:
No. 1: Draconian laws depriving citizens of elementary civil rights.
The federal, state, county, and city governments are now restricting almost every freedom except those of travel and speech.
Americans have been banned from going to work (and thereby earning a living), meeting in groups (both indoors and outdoors), meeting in their cars in church parking lots to pray, and entering state-owned properties such as beaches and parks—among many other prohibitions.
No. 2: A mass media supportive of the state’s messaging and deprivation of rights.
The New York Times, CNN, and every other mainstream mass medium—except Fox News, The Wall Street Journal (editorial and opinion pages only), and talk radio—have served the cause of state control over individual Americans’ lives just as Pravda served the Soviet government.
In fact, there is almost no more dissent in The New York Times than there was in Pravda. And the Big Tech platforms are removing posts about the virus and potential treatments they deem “misinformation.”
No. 3: Use of police.
Police departments throughout America have agreed to enforce these laws and edicts with what can only be described as frightening alacrity.
After hearing me describe police giving summonses to, or even arresting, people for playing baseball with their children on a beach, jogging alone without a mask, or worshipping on Easter while sitting isolated in their cars in a church parking lot, a police officer called my show.
He explained that the police have no choice. They must respond to every dispatch they receive.
“And why are they dispatched to a person jogging on a beach or sitting alone in a park?” I asked.
Because the department was informed about these lawbreakers.
“And who told the police about these lawbreakers?” I asked.
His answer brings us to the fourth characteristic of a police state:
No. 4: Snitches.
How do the police dispatchers learn of lawbreakers such as families playing softball in a public park, lone joggers without face masks, etc.? From their fellow citizens snitching on them.
The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, set up a “snitch line,” whereby New Yorkers were told to send authorities photos of fellow New Yorkers violating any of the quarantine laws.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti similarly encouraged snitching, unabashedly using the term.
It is said that about 1 in every 100 East German citizens were informers for the Stasi, the East German secret police, as superbly portrayed in the film “The Lives of Others.” It would be interesting, and, I think, important, to know what percentage of New Yorkers informed on their fellow citizens.
Now, again, you may think such a comparison is not morally valid, that de Blasio’s call to New Yorkers to serve a Stasi-like role was morally justified given the coronavirus pandemic. But you cannot deny it is Stasi-like or that, other than identifying spies during World War II, this is unprecedented in American history at anywhere near this level.
This past Friday night, I gathered with six others for a Shabbat dinner with friends in Santa Monica, California. On my Friday radio show, I announced I would be doing that, and if I was arrested, it would be worth it.
In my most pessimistic dreams, I never imagined that in America, having dinner at a friend’s house would be an act of civil disobedience, perhaps even a criminal act.
But that is precisely what happens in a police state.
The reason I believe this is a dress rehearsal is that too many Americans appear untroubled by it; the dominant force in America, the left, supports it, and one of the two major political parties has been taken over by the left.
Democrats and their supporters have, in effect, announced they will use state power to enforce any law they can to combat the even greater “existential” crisis of global warming.
On the CNN website this weekend, in one of the most frightening and fanatical articles in an era of fanaticism, Bill Weir, CNN chief climate correspondent, wrote an open letter to his newborn son.
In it, he wrote of his idealized future for America: “completely new forms of power, food, construction, transportation, economics, and politics.”
You cannot get there without a police state.
If you love liberty, you must see that it is jeopardized more than at any time since America’s founding. And that means, among other things, that at this time, a vote for any Democrat is a vote to end liberty.
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I figured out years ago that journalism is the opposite of math.
Holman W. Jenkins Jr. shows another opposite of journalism:
I joked the other day that the media doesn’t do multivariate, but it wasn’t a joke. Sometimes it imposes a hard cap on what we can achieve with public policy when the press can’t fulfill its necessary communication function.
This column isn’t about Sweden, but the press now claims Sweden’s Covid policy is “failing” because it has more deaths than its neighbors. Let me explain again: When you do more social distancing, you get less transmission. When you do less, you get more transmission. Almost all countries are pursuing a more-or-less goal, not a reduce-to-zero goal. Sweden expects a higher curve but in line with its hospital capacity. Sweden’s neighbors are not avoiding the same deaths with their stronger mandates, they are delaying them, to the detriment of other values.
The only clear failure for Sweden would come if a deus ex machina of some sort were to arrive to cure Covid-19 in the near future. Then all countries (not just Sweden) might wish in retrospect to have suppressed the virus more until their citizens could benefit from the miracle cure.
Please, if you are a journalist reporting on these matters and can’t understand “flatten the curve” as a multivariate proposition, leave the profession. You are what economists call a “negative marginal product” employee. Your nonparticipation would add value. Your participation subtracts it.
Let’s apply this to the U.S. Americans took steps to counter the 1957 and 1968 novel flu pandemics but nothing like indiscriminate lockdowns. Adjusted for today’s U.S. population (never mind our older average age), 1957’s killed the equivalent of 230,000 Americans today and 1968’s 165,000. So far, Covid has killed 57,000.
Before patting ourselves on the back, however, notice that we haven’t stopped the equivalent deaths, only delayed them while we destroy our economy and the livelihoods of millions of people.
That’s because public officials haven’t explained how to lift their unsustainable lockdowns while most of the public remains uninfected and there’s no vaccine.
Hopefully we will demonstrate our mettle in the next chapter but I have yet to see it.
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Two months ago, it had been mandatory in my local grocery to use only shopping bags brought from home. Plastic bags were illegal by local ordinance. Then the virus hit. Suddenly the opposite was true. It was illegal to bring bags from home because they could spread disease. Plastic bags were mandatory. As a huge fan of plastic bags, I experienced profound Schadenfreude.
It’s amazing how the prospect of death clarifies priorities.
Before the virus, we indulged in all sorts of luxuries such as dabbling in dirtiness and imagining a world purified by bucolic naturalness. But when the virus hit, we suddenly realized that a healthy life really matters and that natural things can be very wicked. And then when government put everyone under house arrest and criminalized freedom itself, we realized many other things too. And we did it fast.
Lots of people are predicting how life will fundamentally change in light of our collective experience this last month. I agree but I don’t think it will turn out quite as people think. This whole period has been an unconscionable trauma for billions of people, wrecking lives far beyond what even the worst virus could achieve. I’m detecting enormous, unfathomable levels of public fury barely beneath the surface. It won’t stay beneath the surface for long.
Our lives in the coming years will be defined by forms of blowback in the wake of both the disease and the egregious policy response, as a much needed corrective. The thing is that you can’t take away everyone’s rights, put a whole people under house arrest, and abolish the rule of law without generating a response to that in the future.
1. Blowback Against Media
I’m a long-time fan of the New York Times. Jeer if you want but I’ve long admired their reporting, their professionalism, their steady hand, their first draft of history, even if I don’t share the paper’s center-left political bent.
Something about this virus caused the paper to go completely off the rails. In early March, they began to report on it as if it were the Black Death, suggesting not just closing schools and businesses but actually calling for a complete totalitarian policy. It was shocking and utterly preposterous. The guy who wrote that article has a degree in rhetoric from Berkeley and yet he was calling the shots on the paper’s entire response to disease on a national level. They’ve gone so far as to falsify dates in their reporting in order to manipulate the timeline (I called them outon a case in point; the paper made the change but never admitted the error.)
I’m sure that in the coming days and weeks, the paper will dial back all this blather just as they did their certainty that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election. In fact, they have already started with an admission that the virus was already widespread in the months before the lockdown (which suggests that most everything else the paper has written since March has been wrong). But it will be too late. They bear some moral culpability for what has happened to our country.
Anyway, I don’t want to pick on the Times alone; the media has been nearly in lockstep on the need for lockdown forever and on the claim that this virus is universally lethal for everyone. You can read in various spots alternative opinions from experts (here here here here here here hereplus a thousand others plus videos with serious voices).
But notice that all these links point to sites that do not enjoy viral traffic. AIER has been a leading voice, obviously.
Once you get up to speed on the real story here, with authoritative voices, you turn on Fox, CNN, NYT, CNBC, and all of the rest (the WSJ has been slightly better), and you hear nothing about any of this. They merely spin tales. People glued to the tube have almost no clue about any basics, such as how long the virus has been here, how gigantic is the denominator that makes up the fatality ratio, how many people have zero symptoms so that it’s not even an annoyance, the true demographic makeup of the victim population, and the unlikelihood that many of these deaths would have been preventable through any policy.
Watching this disgusting parade of media-driven ignorance, genuine experts or even people passingly curious about data, have become demoralized. Surely many people have already stopped listening to the news completely because it is nothing but a distraction from the reality on the ground.
Why and how did this happen? An obvious answer seems almost too simple: the media wants people at home staring at the television. Maybe that’s the whole thing. But it almost seems too cynical to be the full explanation. In any case, I’m not the only one noticing this. I seriously doubt that the credibility of the mainstream media will survive this. There will be blowback. Much needed!
2. Blowback Against Politicians
You do recall, don’t you, that the governors and mayors who imposed the lockdowns never asked their citizens about their views about instantly getting rid of all rights and freedoms. They didn’t consult legislatures. They didn’t consult a range of expert opinion or pay attention to any serious demographic data that showed how utterly preposterous it was to force non-vulnerable populations into house arrest while trapping vulnerable populations in nursing homes that became Covid-soaked killing fields.
They thought nothing of shattering business confidence, violating contractual rights, wrecking tens of millions of lives, prohibiting freedom in association, tanking the stock market, blowing all budgets, shutting down international travel, and even closing the churches. Amazing. Every government executive except a few became a tin-pot dictator.
The first hint of the possible blowback came from Henry Kissinger who warned in the Wall Street Journal on April 8: “Nations cohere and flourish on the belief that their institutions can foresee calamity, arrest its impact and restore stability. When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed.”
Yes, that’s quite an understatement.
From testing failures to policy failures to profligate fiscal and monetary policies to straight up brutalism in its shutdown antics, the reputation of government in general will not fare well. When the dust settles on this, a whole generation of leaders could be wiped out, provided we return to democratic forms of government, which surely we will. Left or right, Republican or Democrat, there will be a serious price to pay. Politicians acted rashly for fear of their political futures. They will find that they made the wrong choice.
3. Blowback Against Environmentalism
Wash your hands, they kept telling us. But we turn on the faucet and hardly anything comes out. They ruined them some years ago with flow stoppers. The water isn’t hot because the hot-water heaters don’t work as well due to regulations. Keep your clothing and dishes clean but our washing machines and dishwashers hardly work. And let us not forget that our toilets are also non-functional.
Government has wrecked sanitation by ruining our appliances in the name of conservation. And now we suddenly discover that we care about cleanliness and getting rid of germs: nice discovery! Implementing this is going to require that we upend the restrictions, pull out the flow stoppers, permission new and functioning toilets, turn up our water heaters, fix the detergents and so on. We played fast and loose with germs and now we regret it.
So yes, plastic bags are back, and the disease-carrying reusables are gone, but that’s just the beginning. Recycling mandates will go away. Hand dryers in bathrooms will be rethought. Bring back single-use items and universalize them! We will care again about the quality of life as a first priority. As for nature and nature’s germs, be gone!
4. Blowback Against Social Distance
Staying away from direct contact with sick people is a good idea; we’ve known since the ancient world. Vulnerable populations need to be especially careful, such as elderly people have always known. But government took this sensible idea and went crazy with it, separating everyone from everyone else, all in the name of “flattening the curve” to preserve hospital capacity. But then this principle became a general one, to the point that people were encouraged to believe silly things like that standing too close to anyone will magically cause COVID-19 to appear. Going to the grocery today, it’s pretty clear that people think you can get it by talking or looking at people.
Several friends have pointed out to me that they already detect a blowback against all this. And why? There is a dubious merit to the overly generalized principle, and that will become more than obvious in the coming months. Then the blowback hits. I expect a widespread social closening movement to develop here pretty quickly. You will see the bars and dance floors packed, and probably a new baby boom will emerge in a post-COVID19 world.
And the handshake will again become what it began as, a sign of mutual trust.
5. Blowback Against Regulation
In the midst of panic, we discovered that many rules that govern our lives don’t make sense. The regulations on disease testing clogged the system and gave us an epistemic crisis that kicked off this insanity in the first place. Fortunately many politicians did the right thing and repealed many of them. The Americans for Tax Reform has assembled a list of 350 regulations that have been waived. This is hugely encouraging. Let’s keep them waived and never go back.
6. Blowback Against Digital Everything
We keep hearing how this trauma is going to cause everyone to communicate more with video. I don’t believe it. Everyone is experiencing tremendous burnout of these sterile digital environments. Hey, it’s great that they can happen but they are far from ideal.
“Can you hear me?”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Is my picture blurry?”
“Why am I looking up your nose?”
“Change your settings.”
“Silence your mic!”
And so on. At first we thought this was merely a period of adjustment. Now we know that we just don’t like all this nonsense. It’s no way to live.
There is nothing like real people in a real room.
7. Blowback Against Anti-Work
I suppose many workers weren’t entirely unhappy when the boss said work from home. But millions of people have now discovered that this comes at a cost. There is loneliness. The dog. The kids. The spouse. The depressing failure to dress up like a civilized human being. Everyone I know misses the office. They want to be back, be on a schedule, see friends again, experience the joy of collaboration, share jokes, munch on the office donuts.
It was only recently that everyone seemed to be complaining about the workplace. There were endless squabbles about pay, pay equity, race, metoo, executive compensation, family leave policies, and you name it. No one seemed happy.
We didn’t know how good we had it.
8. Blowback Against Experts
The media from the beginning trumpeted some experts over others. We went credential crazy. How many letters you have after your name determines your credibility (unless you have the wrong opinion). But soon we discovered some interesting realities. The experts that everyone wanted to cite were wrong or so loose with their predictions that their predictions were uselessin practice. Dr. Fauci himself wrote on February 28 that this would be a normal flu. Merely a week later, everything changed from calm to panic, and with that change came the wild government response, long after people on their own realized that being careful would be a good idea. Under expert guidance, we swung from one end to the other with very little evidence, exactly against the strong and compelling advice of one of the few experts with credibility remaining.
9. Blowback Against Academia
Just like that, we went from enormously expensive campuses and a huge administrative apparatus to a series of Zoom calls between professor and students, leaving many to wonder what the rest is really worth. Surely many colleges and universities will not survive this. The other problem concerns the marketability of degrees in a world in which whole industries can be shut down in an instant. The college degree was supposed to give us security; the lockdowns took it all away. Also there is the problem of the curriculum itself. Of what value are these soft degrees in social justice in a world in which you are struggling to pay next month’s rent regardless?
As for elementary and secondary education, homeschooling anyone? Its existed under a cloud for decades, before suddenly it became mandatory.
10. Blowback Against Unhealthy Lifestyles
There has been no small effort to suppress the demographics of COVID-19 fatalities but the word is still getting out. This BBC headline sums it up: Nine in 10 dying have existing illness. And here’s another: Obesity is the number one factor in COVID deaths. This should not be lost on people considering improving their overall health and reducing disease vulnerability. Maybe you already feel it and are using your quarantine time to reduce and get fit or at least stop advancing too quickly toward your final demise. There are things we can do, people!
This would be an enormous change in American culture, to say the least.
11. Blowback Against Spending
You are likely saving lots of money from cutting entertainment. Feels good, doesn’t it? Regret not having saved more to prepare for these days? This will change dramatically. Those mattresses are going to get stuffed with cash in the coming year or two. It’s all fine: savings leads to investment, provided people have an ironclad promise that nothing like the monstrous destruction of the last month will ever occur again.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 