The left's imaginary COVID ‘reckoning’
Also: In defense of DOGE; Are we finally ending the Department of Eduction?
Jonathan Chait’s new Atlantic piece, “Why the COVID Reckoning Is So One-Sided,” should have been about Democrats wrestling with the fact that they were relentlessly and tragically wrong about virtually everything during the pandemic. No such luck. In Chait’s telling, the left remains uncannily open-minded, striving for truth, while the dogmatic right remains hopelessly bogged down in “pathological incuriosity.” Even when conservatives are right, they’re right in the wrong way.
From my piece:
Rather than conceding reality, Chait tries to both-side the pandemic response by pointing to bad predictions by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Hey, there’s no doubt Republicans said plenty of crazy things. But conceiving cures or being unduly optimistic about the end of the pandemic isn’t nearly as pernicious, immoral, or authoritarian as shuttering churches, cordoning off playgrounds, destroying businesses, censoring dissent, forcing thousands of Americans to miss the funerals of loved ones, or undermining the future millions of schoolchildren.
So, while Trump was “brainstorming weird medical ideas live from the White House,” his cures were aggressively covered and debunked (sometimes falsely) by the media. The truth-seeking Left rarely, if ever, scrutinized the diktats of Anthony Fauci. Any skepticism was treated as an assault on science itself. As it turns out, Fauci lied about the threshold for herd immunity, about masking, about the lab leak theory, and about many other issues. When three scientists — Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Bhattacharya — released the “Great Barrington Declaration,” questioning the efficacy of lockdowns and warning (correctly) about the damaging “physical and mental health impacts” of closing schools, Fauci colluded with others to suppress the document, plotting a “quick and devastating published takedown.”
The Left media were happy to be unskeptical shills for public health officials.
Signalgate
This week on the podcast I ask Mollie about her appearance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. We also take a deep dive on the administration’s embarrassing Signal chat fallout and revisit some of the alleged racial aspects of the excellent Adolescence.
In Defense of DOGE
Elon Musk and DOGE leadership did a great job defending their mission during an extended interview with Bret Baier last week.
I wrote about it in the New York Post:
DOGE’s Brad Smith told Baier that the National Institutes of Health has 700 separate IT systems. The agency, which has grown to house an incredible 27 different sub-centers, can’t communicate about fiscal issues or share scientific data.
Then again, the NIH has 27 Chief Information Officers to explain it all, all of them making a nice salary and pension, no doubt.
Aram Moghaddassi, a computer engineer working for DOGE, pointed out that the government spends $100 billion each year funding outmoded systems, some of which have been around for 50 years.
The retirement papers of federal workers are still filled out by hand and sent to a giant mine in Pennsylvania for storage. DOGE is going to digitize them.
Watch the interview here.
Department of Education
The freakout over Donald Trump‘s executive order instructing the administration to begin eliminating the Department of Education has nothing to do with learning or teaching. The department doesn’t provide funding for the buildings, textbooks, or teacher salaries. Nearly 90% of all K–12 public school spending comes from state and local sources.
No, the left loves the DOE because it has long been a means of implementing social policies through centralized government and rewarding the political allies.
From my column this week.
Though the existence of the Education Department holds the promise of nationalizing education policy, which is the ultimate goal of the Left, Democrats have mostly used the agency to compel social conservatives unilaterally to adopt left-wing cultural values.
In 2011, then-President Barack Obama had the Department of Education send a “guidance letter,” stripping due process rights of high school and college students accused of sexual misconduct — no longer allowing them to question accusers, review accusations, present exculpatory evidence, or call witnesses.
It was also through the Education Department that the Biden administration prohibited schools from barring transgender students from using the bathrooms of their choice but compelled schools to allow boys to participate in girls sports and teachers to use pronouns that corresponded with a student’s chosen “gender identity.”
Democrats don’t need the Education Department for these Title IX projects. They could just as easily weaponize the Justice Department to bully social conservatives.
Then, of course, there are the teachers unions. The National Education Association, the country’s largest union, and the American Federation of Teachers are suing the administration over Trump’s executive order. These public sector unions already funnel taxpayer dollars into political advocacy, helping elect national Democrats who, in turn, protect union monopolies and send billions in Education Department grants to support teacher “development” and other perks. It’s a racket.
The rest here.
Until next week.