David French was once a conservative, in the same sense that David Brooks was – someone with a solid sense of the principles, but a serious problem with application.
But somewhere along the line, French’s capacity for critical thought eroded away to nil.
For example:
In hindsight, the anti-vax movement will be seen as one of the most destructive and nonsensical mass fads of a destructive and nonsensical era. https://t.co/J1mPQfPvVX
Now – let’s talk about the destructive and nonsensical application of public health procedures during Covid, which destroyed and rendered nonsensical the respect for what had been until 2020 the most indestructible and sensible of the nation’s instititutions, the CDC?
Hey, look! The guy who banned family Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings, limited the Cathedral of Saint Paul to ten worshippers (and Kissin’ Cousins’ Sports Bar in Newfolden to 50) and tried to get you fired for not getting vaccinated…:
Today’s the anniversary of Minnesota’s Great Leap Backward.
Me? I was on my way home from the office, listening the governor on MPR as he announced the most draconian set of emergency powers in Minnesota history. On the way, I stopped at a Total Wine. The store has eight checkout lines, of which two are normally operating; I’ve never waited in a line longer than three deep, even then.
All eight registers were humming, stacked 6-7 people deep, and the store was packed.
They needn’t have worried; big box liquor stores, and big box stores of all kinds, found themselves exempted from the Governor’s swerve into autocracy.
Denying the industralized murder of 11 million people,
versus
Legitimate questions and doubts about everything government told us about Covid from the very beginning – remembering that many of the “conspiracy theories” of 2020/2021 turned out to be true: natural immunity works, and for longer than the vaccines; fomite spread didn’t happen; lockdowns were useless at best; the Great Barrington Declaration was right (the vaccines should have been targeted at the elderly and vulnerable), researchers lied even about the intended effects of vaccines or that “Zero Covid” was ever possible, masks made little to no difference, and there’s a pretty significant chance the virus did start as a result of Frankenvirus research in China.
Holocaust denial is a social pathology. Pandemic “denial”, at four years remove, is neither pathological nor especially denying any fact.
Why, it’s the sound of millions of peoples senses of self-righteous indignation, their mode of instant social sorting, their handy form of smug virtue-signaling, and that little knot of terror that they cultivated and nursed into their worldview, slowly smoldering into ash:
NYU Professor calls for COVID amnesty on Bill Maher:
“I wanted a harsher lockdown policy. In retrospect: I was wrong… But here's the bottom line: We were doing our best. Let’s give a little grace and forgiveness.”pic.twitter.com/sxEY9nnhki
And on behalf of all the small businesses strangled by your mistake, all the parents who watched their kids slowly go crazy and stupid, and felt their personal, social and business relationships fraying and breaking?
Reporter Brianna Kelly spent months talking to downtown Minneapolis businesses about the flexible hybrid approach of downtown’s largest employer, and the impact it is having on the local economy.
“You know, everyone wants Target to be back; we need Target to be back,” Kelly said. “They’re a huge part of the entire ecosystem downtown.”
The story behind the story is this: if the wellbeing of Downtown Minneapolis is that dependent on a single employer, that whole “Minneapolis is a Cold Flint” comparison is looking better and better, and I don’t say that with any great joy.
Polls – and the current performance of the DeSantis campaign – shows that, whether from fatigue or bigger fish to fry, Covid just isn’t that big an issue for most people.
That’s a shame.
In the interest of making sure, to the best of my ability, that nobody forgets, here’s what Democrats were thinking…
…not one week into the pandemic, but in their unhinged hysteria 22 months later.
A third believed the unvaccinated should lose their children.
Of all the history – relevant and otherwise – that people barber on about while taking politics, the fact that this bit of the recent past is downright galling.
Governor Walz is “turning power over” to Lt Governor Flanagan for a few hours while he has a colonoscopy.
Inbox: Gov. Tim Walz will temporarily transfer gov powers to Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan tomorrow while he is under general anesthesia for a colonoscopy. pic.twitter.com/LqX544UuvU
I don’t not expect DFL goons to roam the streets looking for wreckers while she’s in power. Fingers crossed, everyone. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
However, if all goes well, hopefully we’ll get word as to whether the endoscopist found the code for the model that predicted 20-70,000 dead Minnesotans by July 2020.
SITD Bonus: Rejected names for the post:
They Found Esme Murphy
Endoscopy Discovers Every Metro Newsroom
“Nurse, What’s With All The Lip Marks?”
Governor’s Riot Strategy Found
MN Media Metaphor Alert
But again – I’m trying to be a better person than that.
Attention, “fact-checkers” – yet again, we were right and you were wrong. The lab leak theory – which for over half the pandemic was labeled a racist conspiracy theory, repeating which could get you kicked off of social media and drummed out of polite society – appears to be true.
Media outlets that had once definitively debunked the lab-leak theory innovated a new journalistic genre: the un-debunking. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who’d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory’s proponents — or, at least, to validate their good intentions. “Were news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually ‘wrong’ at the time,” asked the very same Washington Post that had savaged Senator Cotton, “or did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?” You won’t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.
In other words, “the truth may change, but it is always what we say it is”.
And nothing changes the definition of truth more than you-know-who:
In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included “false claims about Covid-19,” including the notion that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.” The decision was attributed to the “evolving nature of the pandemic,” but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What had evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users’ ability to post “content that has been rated false,” or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who “rate” relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook’s defense, ABC News absent-mindedly admitted, “the claims [sic] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.” Enough said.
Because to the – there is no better term – clique that sees itself as running America’s media and messaging, it’s not even the medium that’s the message. It’s the messenger:
In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian Naomi Oreskes admitted that the “lab-leak theory is plausible.” But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling “some of the people promoting the claim” — and Donald Trump, in particular — “irrational.” “We all judge messages by the messenger,” this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough to buck the social pressures culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues’ prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the “idiotic conformity of the right’s pseudo-journalistic apparatus” had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its “propaganda.”
It’s hard to do anything but taunt big media anymore.
If proclamations made with muted, Minnesotan gusto were correlated with economic results, Jacob Frey’s exhortations would have downtown Minneapolis humming along like Dallas.
The 30-story LaSalle Plaza in downtown Minneapolis is scheduled to go to auction next week after the previous owner, the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois, avoided foreclosure by transferring the building to its lender, Northwest Mutual.
Nearby Fifth Street Towers is facing the same fate and may also go back to its lender this month, according to Axios’ sources who were not authorized to discuss the matter.
And it’s not just your garden-variety class-AAAAA office space. It’s the big daddy of all the downtown office buildings (emphasis added):
Real estate analytics firm Trepp is keeping tabs on IDS Center — the city’s most iconic office tower — due to a 77% occupancy rate and the loss of Nordstrom Rack from Crystal Court, said senior managing director Manus Clancy
Rumors of downtown’s non-demise appear to be premature.
Are you old enough to remember when our Expert Class (TM) sicced it’s PR machine, and Big Left’s army of howler monkeys, from Stephen Colbert down to its horde of demi-human twitterbots, on anyone who expressed even ambivalence about Ivermectin?
“Hahaha, he’s peddling horse medicine!” was about the level and extent of the discourse?
Are you that old?
If you’re a toddler, yes – you are.
If you’re older than a toddler, you remember the “expert” response – from the ridicule…
Liberals call for Covid Amnesty. They say Conservatives should forgive Liberals for all the bad things resulting from government’s response to Covid. They say none of those bad things are Liberals’ fault because They Didn’t Know.
Nonsense. We knew when the Diamond Princess docked in February 2020 that Covid afflicted mostly old people with existing co-morbidities. We knew the death rate was 2% of those affected while the death rate of the entire cruise ship population was 14 out of 3711 or .3%. And that’s using the phony numbers from counting all respiratory illness deaths as Covid deaths. Covid was never a threat to the population at large – it was never more than a bad flu – and we knew it early on, which is why we learned to elbow bump and wash our hands while singing the alphabet song.
Yes, but Liberals were forced to impose lockdowns, mask mandates and school closings because all the best scientists said so. If there were alternatives, They Didn’t Know.
Nonsense. The Great Barrington Declaration was signed in October 2020 by some of the worlds leading experts in epidemiology to codify in a simple statement what medical and statistical experts had been saying since the panic began. Lockdowns, mask mandates, and school closings were never the correct way to respond to the outbreak – traditional responses were the correct way – and we knew it within a few months.
Yes, but those people were outliers, malcontents, reactionaries and nay-sayers. Liberals were forced to rely on government bureaucrats and computer models because Liberals had no other source of information. Liberals were left with no choice but to implement lockdowns, mask mandates and school closings to avoid the looming surge of infections and resulting hospital overloads.
Nonsense. Governor Walz announced his lockdown based on computer modeling that was proven wrong within two months. There was no surge and hospitals were not overloaded but instead laid off staff for lack of business, keeping beds open for Covid patients who never arrived. The models were worthless and we knew it long before school resumed. Nurses knew it too but danced in the hospital to prove how much smarter they were than those of us watching. They had time to dance. They had no patients.
Yes, but lockdowns, mask mandates and school closings were necessary to prevent the virus from spreading until we had a safe and effective vaccine, which was not generally available to the public until after President Biden took office. Liberals had no choice but to enact temporary stopgap measures to keep the public safe.
Nonsense. There was never any compelling evidence that lockdowns, mask mandates or school closings prevented the virus from afflicting those it targeted most – the elderly frail population – and considerable evidence that warehousing sick elderly with healthy resulted in killing far more of them. Controlling for age, existing illness, and quality of medical care, there is very little difference in Covid mortality between states like Minnesota (strict restrictions) and Florida (few restrictions). There is substantial difference in economic difference and, I suspect, in education outcomes.
The blogger Sundance writing at Conservative Treehouse coined the phrase “pretending not to know” to explain why Liberals keep doing things which Conservatives can plainly see are wrong, but never expect to be held accountable for the consequences. That’s what’s happening with Covid Amnesty. Liberals are pretending they didn’t know so they shouldn’t be held to account.
They knew.
And did it anyway.
And we’re never going to forgive the damage they’ve done.
Now, let’s talk about the election.
Joe Doakes
Forgiveness without atonement is meaningless.
And that’s what those asking for the “amnesty” are trying to sideslip.
No amnesty. As noted elsewhere, I’ll settle for a Truth and Reconciliation commission.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
David Strom – now writing for Hot Air – meets Dr. Oster halfway:
[Dr. Oster] has generally been a voice of reason on COVID policy, and even when I disagree I respect her. She supported policies I considered and consider appalling, yet she always shared her reasoning and her doubts. Plus she vigorously opposed the COVID excuse to destroy education, and that deserves great respect…Dr. Oster’s premise is simple and easy to grasp. And, under normal circumstances, one with which I could be sympathetic: during the initial phases of COVID people were making decisions in an environment dominated by near total ignorance of the seriousness of COVID, so we should forgive each other for the mistakes made by people and policymakers
But…:
Once data started rolling in and the true scope of its danger was known, COVID became a political cause for the Left, not a public health issue. Public policy and social behavior was no longer grounded in any connection to reality and became a political signifier, and every single awful consequence that has come from the use of COVID as a political cudgel to attack those of us who demanded a rational, measured response is entirely blameworthy. The people who did this must pay a price.
COVID fanatics deserve every single bit of the consequences that are coming for them, and far far more than they will suffer.
I might be inclined to agree with David’s premise – in March and April, maybe May of 2020, when we really didn’t know what was going on, and we didn’t know that Covid wasn’t going to be a demographic scythe mowing down vast swathes of the population? Sure.
Once we got to about June or July – when it was very clear to anyone who could read a graph that Governor Klink’s prediction of 20,000 dead in Minnesota by mid-July, best case, was off by more than an order of magnitude, and he set about concealing the code for the model that led to the prediction because “someone might use it to get different results than we got” (which is the polar opposite of “science”?
For everything that came after – the schools closed, the tsunami of mental health issues, the endless emergency declarations, the boarded-over basketball hoops and bans on selling garden supplies – you want “Amnesty?”
After this?
I’m going to start the negotiation with “military tribunals”.
For the many millions who couldn’t get their cancer, heart disease and other chronic, sometimes life-threatening conditions seen, diagnosed or treated?
Drumhead court-martials are too good.
For the bans on funerals? For the loved ones that died alone in hospitals and LTCs?
I’d be hard-pressed to deny those demanding a “purge night” their due, but this is a civil society.
For the huge advances in the power of the police and surveillance states? For the “emergency powers” seized, and held for well over a year, by tinpot piglets like Gretchen Whitmer and Tim “Klink” Walz?
Give me some heads on pikes – figuratively – and I I might, might, be persuaded to settle for a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, as long as it has the power to imprison people for a long time.
My mother suffered from Alzheimers. She and her husband – also very ill – were in a long-term care in Minot. Her husband died in March 2020. The “emergency” rules in Minnesota – and the carnage caused by Governor Klink and the Department of Health’s policies – meant it took seven months to move her to Minnesota. Seven months during which, alone in a nursing home, my mother declined even more alarmingly than she had before.
Amnesty?
I’m more inclined toward demanding unconditional surrender.
But it’s likely my vote next Tuesday is my only recourse.
Rot in (figurative, electoral) hell, Tim Walz, Peggy Flanagan, and anyone who votes for you.
It’s about six weeks until the election. And with polls showing Governor Klink seven points up on Scott Jensen, it’s time to remind minnesotans, with their famously short attention span‘s, about what this last couple of years have been like.
The Twin Cities media desperately wants to memoryhole this episode:
Your periodic reminder that @GovTimWalz attended the packed funeral of a stranger (who I'll argue he had a hand in killing) along with an unmasked @SenAmyKlobuchar – while you were not permitted to have a gathering of any size to mourn your dead child, parent, sibling or spouse. pic.twitter.com/PavvNt3jh4
“Essential“ workers – people whose stores and businesses had to be kept open at all costs; grocery stores, gas stations, pretty much any big box store, and the worlds largest candy store, in Jordan, which just happens to be owned by a big DFL campaign donor.
“Nonessential“ workers – people who worked at frivolous hustles like oncology clinics, cardiologists, and all manner of surgeons.
“The Laptop Class“ – everyone who could work at home, including most government union employees. and pretty much any big box store
But then, his administration added injury to insult. while you couldn’t visit your family in hospitals or nursing homes, or whole funerals if they passed, somehow the Klink administration made a “scientific“ exception for demonstrations and riots – which, according to the “party of science“, were actually good for health, since science.
The Twin Cities media is going to go out of its way not to remind you of any of this, or of the prosecutions of business that, desperate to stay solvent, defied the ham fisted and unscientific emergency orders.
It’s been going for almost a week and ends this weekend, but I haven’t seen any hand-wringing articles from the mainstream media about the Sturgis motorcycle rally.
People often would send in lists of “non-essential” businesses that remained open or weren’t strictly following masking requirements, according to files from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA).
Another complaint reported on people for purchasing non-essential items at a convenience store in White Bear Lake. “Customers are coming and saying, ‘I’m bored and needed to get out of the house.’ They buy lottery tickets, a candy bar, a soda … those items are not ‘essential.’”
I was about to write“This might not be my better self speaking“.
But I think everybody’s better self wants a chunk out of these people, too.
