Remember how officials and public figures forced your loved ones to die alone, locked you in your home for months or years, divided your family and friends, kept your kids out of school, closed your churches, forced you to wear a pointless face diaper, filled skate parks with sand, closed playgrounds, prevented people from buying seeds at the store, shut down your business, mandated you take a vaccine that didn't do what they said it did and FIRED you if you didn't take it, and generally absolutely RUINED the last two years of your life because they were scared of a virus?
Well, a writer for The Atlantic has an absolutely wonderful idea.
Let's just completely forget about all that and forgive people for it!
Here's how this story begins, and it's illustrative of the whole problem with this thinking.
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her "SOCIAL DISTANCING!"
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn't have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn't know.
Yeah, the thing is you didn't know. But millions and millions of normal, everyday Americans DID know. From the beginning.
They were completely shut out of polite society. Reputations destroyed and marginalized.
Here's one article we published in November 2020 detailing mortality stats as an example:
And here's a sampling of the hundreds of articles that Not The Bee has written on the topic of Covid insanity alone (the Twitter links are broken in many cases because so many people were banned for sharing "misinformation"):
But, whatever, how could anyone have known that this was wrong and evil and stuff???
The article continues to give example after example of how everyone simply "trusted the experts" and did their best, but had no clue what the truth was.
To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students' well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people — people who cared about children and teachers — advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.
This is straight-up false. EVERYONE who saw the data knew from the beginning that schools didn't need to close.
Schools never needed to shut down and as early as April 2020 that was completely clear.
Teachers' unions wanted to stay out. They manipulated the CDC. This is well documented.
Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn't accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn't a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
Umm, this is SO frustrating.
None of the lockdowns, none of the masking, none of the mandates made ANY difference.
It just ruined healthy people's lives for no reason.
It's easy to see why this person who was clearly wrong every single step of the way would want those, largely on the right, who were proven right, not to hold it over their heads.
And, honestly, I can forgive some ignorant "journalist" at The Atlantic for being fooled.
My beef is with the supposed "experts" in government and the scientific establishment that fed us a straight line of BS for years straight.
Of course, the media deserves a lot of blame as well for their fear mongering based on clear lies.
Some more examples of the absolute evil perpetrated during the pandemic, in case you forgot:
There needs to be a reckoning:
