Sometimes it feels like it was yesterday. Sometimes it feels like a century ago. We now find ourselves in mid-March 2024, four years since the week the country began to shut down and the world changed forever. The legacy of coronavirus abuse holds many lessons for those who want to see them, but too many are still unwilling to say them. Never again.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity is one of the former.of non-partisan The committee released its four-year report Review reportdetails “significant policy mistakes and lessons” from the coronavirus that range from public “health, economic, education, and civil liberties concerns.” The book offers 10 lessons that, in hindsight, seem like common sense. Leaders should not incite fear, and scientists should prioritize open inquiry. Masks, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates do far more harm than good. Closing schools and offices (while paying people to stay home) hurts the most vulnerable. Resources should be targeted to at-risk groups. At every step, our leaders have done the opposite, ignoring or maliciously concealing the negative social costs of their policy prescriptions. Therefore, the report concludes that only by severely limiting government power can our nation’s elite institutions regain the public trust they squandered during the pandemic.
thank you @Valnico For this great 1.5 minute summary: @Comm4Prosperity Papers on the new coronavirus @ScottAtlas_IT, @Steve Hankeand @Ksieb Mulligan!
The full text is here: https://t.co/P8eZxVrh0o pic.twitter.com/W3HtevxMfu
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) March 18, 2024
But elite arbiters of science and morality show no sign of considering these lessons. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) coronavirus guidelines remain largely the same. push Masks, Vaccines, Social Distancing and Staying with the Early Hysterics predictionAnd perhaps most sinisterly, it continues to focus on the destructive left.capital” Principles of Health Allocation. While the corporate media routinely hyperventilates with each new season’s game, the most prominent legacy of the coronavirus, its systematic attempts to censor “misinformation,” is now central to the Democratic Party’s ethos. It is an important element.
So while the report’s findings reflect the right message, they remain unheeded and hopelessly naive. Our leaders will never self-correct. No one responsible ever admits their responsibility. If anything, they will all relish the chance to run the full gamut again, as the misuse of the coronavirus becomes increasingly institutionalized in the daily operations of government. Flows change only when forced. Besides a counterinsurgency by the true conservative elites within the bureaucracy (don’t hold your breath), the only thing that will make that possible is an overwhelming show of grassroots opposition. The people must make it clear that they will never go along with this again. (Related: Democrats changed the meaning of a ‘black swan’ event)
Given this, it’s worth considering why they agreed to it in the first place. Such a radical and coercive imposition of personal autonomy is not only unprecedented in American history, but goes against centuries of our deepest cultural traditions. Now, there is a lot to be said about how the veneer of safetyism has gradually replaced our culture of rugged individualism, creating a perfect storm for the moralization of lockdowns. But the un-American coronavirus response succeeded in large part because the elites used another core element of American life as a weapon against the people.
thank you @WSJ. In some cases, facts may also be published in print journalism. Full report ↪️https://t.co/o7Jgho5l9u
And yes, it’s good to be right 😉 pic.twitter.com/mw0QGVy9I4
— The Independent with Scott Atlas (@ScottAtlas_IT) March 19, 2024
Last week, I wrote about a foolish defense of “.Swift normalityThose on the right include the “inoffensive, law-abiding, upwardly mobile, middle-class culture” that the public aspires to and that pop star Taylor Swift is said to embody. It is. Ignore for now whether Swift actually represents this. I would argue that she doesn’t, but that doesn’t matter.What matters is that it’s now Become trend Some right-wing intellectuals have begun to denounce the abnormal “freaks” on their side and instead return to this so-called Swiftian sensibility. But it was precisely this attitude that bureaucrats, politicians, and media hacks were counting on to bulldoze the American people during COVID-19. (Related: Republicans don’t have a “freak” problem, they have an elitist hole problem)
All of these institutions worked together to solidify the idea that Following The Science™ is what makes a good, “ordinary” citizen. They did this because they understood that Americans wanted bourgeois respectability, a healthy respect for meritocratic expertise, and a serious concern for their neighbors and fellow citizens. The never-ending propaganda is such that Americans “protect yourself and others” and has developed a cult-like following among the most educated and wealthy people. This further reinforced the idea that trusting experts was a sign of respectability, and motivated the middle class to imitate those above them in order to improve their social status. It’s the same reason a middle-class nurse splurges on a Lexus like a doctor running a clinic.
On the other hand, “aberrants” or “science deniers” were those who rebelled against the scientific and moral authority of experts. Through exclusionary mandates in schools, workplaces, public spaces from sports stadiums to Costco, and often even family functions, the message was clear: You are abnormal and do not deserve to be part of polite society. But in the end, it’s precisely the “weirdos” who do the right thing about… well, almost everything.
The last thing conservatives need is to accept standards of normalcy held up by radical political actors. Instead, we must embrace the gross abnormality, or the true normality as it was once defined. Despite their qualifications, prestige, and official accolades, the coronavirus experts’ prescriptions were decidedly bizarre, both in terms of American history and human nature. We are not alone. We do not spend our lives prioritizing the interests of some abstract group. And we don’t blindly follow authority without a healthy dose of skepticism. The current situation brought on by the coronavirus is by no means normal, and operating within its own confines only cedes further to the left. The generational project for conservatives must be to reclaim the mantle of normalcy advocated in the CUP report and sell it to the public again. Even if we accept Swiftian normalcy, if the left criticizes everything, we will only repeat the cycle of tyranny.
