Articles

My experience covering the hyperpartisan scientific community for years taught me to view coronavirus fearmongering and lockdown orders with skepticism. The credentialed class declared war on Donald Trump the night he won. Scientific “experts” cannot be trusted to separate their political agendas from their professional obligations, which they proved last summer when the “social distancing” dogma they foisted on the rest of us suddenly didn’t apply to mobs of “social justice” protestors and rioters enraged over George Floyd’s death.

Coronavirus hysteria and its cure—shutting down the national economy, including schools—quickly evolved into an explosive issue on the Right; longtime allies were at each other’s throats. Pundits and journalists who were compatriots during Trump’s tumultuous first term fought on social media in a very public feud. The battle, in some cases, became highly personal. [...]

It was a fraught time for everyone, of course, but early lockdown skeptics faced especially harsh condemnation from all sides since we bucked the clichéd “we’re-all-in-this-together” groupthink. The blinders were on for lots of otherwise smart people who were either ignorant or naïve about what the Left is capable of doing or perhaps too frightened of the virus to be honest with themselves. [...]

Even I underestimated the wickedness of the Left, how far they would go to exploit the crisis. I also underestimated the cowardice of so-called conservative leaders who not only refused to confront catastrophic, liberty-crushing lockdowns but went along with those authoritarian government orders. Republican governors, for the most part, have acted as badly as their Democratic counterparts. [...]

The damage done by lockdowns—economic, mental, physical, emotional, educational—is incalculable. Once the shock wears off, the horror stories of what happened after March 2020 will be told for years. The number of victims of inhumane lockdowns will far exceed those impacted by the disease itself...