First of all, let me get this out of the way: Emily Oster, the author of the article I am about to eviscerate, doesn’t deserve the scorn I am about to heap on her.

Honestly, that’s true. She 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.

Yet I am going to dump on her anyway, because while she as a person and thinker doesn’t deserve ridicule, her latest article in The Atlantic surely does. And since I am (usually) more concerned with ideas than personalities I am going to take liberties here. Still, I sincerely pre-apologize to Dr. Oster, and I hope that she can be as forgiving to me as she asks us to be toward COVID fascists.

My latest in @TheAtlantic https://t.co/w6GIOEMhZv

— ProfEmilyOster (@ProfEmilyOster) October 31, 2022

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.

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.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

All right. Makes sense. I in fact hold no animus towards people who made mistakes early on during the COVID pandemic. Either for the people who dismissed it as a minor problem (it wasn’t exactly minor–tons of people died), nor those who feared it could be the next Black Plague (even early on it clearly wasn’t, but given China’s very scary behavior before COVID spread outside its boundaries, it wasn’t irrational to fear that it was super dangerous).

Fumigating in Wuhan pic.twitter.com/xRiQSR5R38

— Because China (@zhong_guo_tong) February 6, 2020

Given these facts, I am and always was inclined to be generous in forgiving initial mistakes made when the pandemic hit. We saw citywide fumigation in China, hundreds in body bags, the inevitable media hype for ratings, and the initial inclination to overreact rather than under-react to avoid disaster. How can you not be scared?

Then facts came out, and not too long after the initial panic. It was clear that the COVID-19 virus was nasty, but was no plague, nor even a 1918 flu virus. It was a seriously nasty bug that targeted certain vulnerable populations, but left most people with a period of illness followed by a relatively quick recovery. Even “long-COVID” was more similar to Lyme disease than anything else. Nasty, unfortunately, but we live with worse.

In other words, the wisdom of the viciously attacked–to this day, mind you–Great Barrington Declaration has been vindicated.

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.

Once April or May 2020 rolled around the Left clearly realized that COVID would make an outstanding political tool with which to bash the Republicans, and even more important it would become a tool to fundamentally reshape society in a manner that would be much more to their liking. Democrats in the United States started using COVID as a cudgel, not as a problem to be rationally addressed.

Freedom–always the enemy of the Left–could be constrained at the whim of politicians using “emergency” powers. Dissenters could be censored because they were spreading “misinformation,” compliance could be compelled (mask mandates) with serious economic and social consequences attached to failure to comply, and grand plans for social and economic transformation were set in motion. Wearing a mask became a symbol of the desire to oppress, and was a license to do so with impunity.

The World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab launched the  “Great Reset” with the publishing of his book “The Great Reset” in July of 2020. He argued that COVID could be used as the spark to completely remake society. The Left took up the cause with gusto. COVID would help remake the economy, the society, and world affairs.

None of this was benign. It did not spring out of mistakes, and the consequences to health (emergency rooms are filled with people suffering from illnesses untreated during COVID), to education, and to social trust are incalculable. And every one of those consequences springs from the choice to use COVID as a political tool with the full knowledge of the elites that they were not telling the truth.

So no, I will not forgive and forget, and neither should anyone else. These were not innocent mistakes, but the result of a plan to exploit people’s fears–fears that the elites did everything to stoke–for their own benefit. Trillions of dollars were transferred from ordinary people to billionaires, children suffered enormous learning loss, lives were ruined, literally. People still cannot enter the US (legally) without a COVID vaccine. It is insane. 

And, as the Telegraph has reported, non-COVID excess deaths now exceed COVID deaths — due to the horrible policies put in place by the elites. COVID policies are killing people and the problem will get worse as the lack of preventative medicine takes its toll.

We should forgive our relatives and our friends for their irrational behavior, but we should not forgive a single policy maker who used COVID as an excuse to oppress us. Canadians should politically destroy Trudeau, Europeans the fascists who oppressed them, and Americans the Democrat and Republican politicians who signed on to this evil oppression.

Too few will pay the price that they should, and the Democrats, even in this Red wave election year, will survive as a political force. But they shouldn’t. What they did was literally unforgivable, and you can count me out of this movement to do so.