No, Let’s Not: Perpetrators of Pandemic Authoritarianism Cannot Be Forgiven

“It must become embarrassing to admit one ever supported uninformed and nonconsensual participation in a medical experiment or mass house arrest and coerced isolation.”

The regime media’s orchestration of Coronavirus (COVID-19) hysteria and authoritarian response finally seems to be on the back foot. With this criminal social catastrophe over at last, we have the space to look back and analyze the phenomenon in sum. If I had to pick a single moment emblematic of its high tide, it would probably be The Atlantic’s April, 2021 character assassination of Alex Berenson as “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man.” Suspicious even at the time, this sorry episode is all the more delicious given what has since come to light. Berenson had repeatedly chastised The Atlantic for being the most consistently and egregiously misinformed and misinforming peddler of regime propaganda on all things COVID-19 and was famously banned by Twitter for—literally—telling politically inconvenient truths, known now and then. It is worth keeping in mind throughout that real “misinformation” can be refuted; only the truth needs to be censored.

Berenson has since been reinstated following a lawsuit against Twitter that revealed not only did he tell no lies generally nor break any Twitter rules specifically but that Twitter almost certainly was acting at the express direction of the Executive branch of the United States federal government in clear violation of the First Amendment. While there are surely more juicy revelations to follow from that case, it also suggests that the true purpose of The Atlantic’s earlier piece was to agitate for exactly this now-proven-to-be-unwarranted censorship. Summarizing this, and more, Berenson would go on to write in his Substack that “when it comes to bad Covid takes, the Atlantic is the unquestioned champion.”

And how prophetic Berenson has turned out to be, for The Atlantic just published the mother of all astonishingly, offensively awful COVID-19 takes, as the reader is probably well aware. In an October 31st piece titled, “Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty,” Emily Oster effectively argues that, well, shucks, we did our best, and we couldn’t have known any better, so let’s just forgive and forget. The contrast to “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” is astonishing. The tide is well and truly going out.