There is an old expression: “Success has a thousand fathers but failure is always an orphan.”
It’s a spin on Tacitus: “This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”
We can judge the results of the pandemic response, then, by the number of people who claim it as their own. So far the answer seems to be: none.
These days, if you listen to the rhetoric, you would think that absolutely no one forced anyone to do anything, not even take the jab. There were no mask mandates. No one was ever locked down. There were some mistakes, sure, but those came only from doing the best we could with the knowledge we had.
Other than make well-considered recommendations, they didn’t force anyone to do anything.
Even from 2021, the media routinely referred to the “pandemic” and not the pandemic policies as responsible for learning losses, depression, business failures, and poor economic conditions. This has been deliberate. It’s designed to normalize lockdowns as if they are just something one does to deal with infectious disease, even though lockdowns have no precedent on that scale in the West.
More recently, this denialism has taken a strange turn. Now the people who actually did pull the trigger on the loss of liberty are routinely refusing to admit that they forced anything.
We’ve heard Donald Trump make this claim for a good part of this year. Mr. “I left it to the states” has yet to be publicly confronted with his decisions from March 10, 2020 and throughout the rest of his presidency. Interviewers don’t press him on the subject for fear of having access cut off later. And yet the record is very clear.
rump did some great things (I can think of 3 of them on SCOTUS) But we need to STOP the gaslighting. He unraveled our country by kowtowing to Fauci and pushing lockdowns and vaccines – which TO THIS DAY – he has never renounced.
How much responsibility does Trump bear? pic.twitter.com/3SsFkRVR7u
— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) September 2, 2023
