From Tom Woods today. Someone, maybe even me, may have posted a link to this Atlantic article in the past several days, if so, I apologize (maybe to myself) for the repeat:
Well, how about this.
The Atlantic, which hasn't exactly been on our side through all this, just published an article by Emma Green called "The Liberals Who Can't Quit Lockdown."
Subtitle: "Progressive communities have been home to some of the fiercest battles over COVID-19 policies, and some liberal policy makers have left scientific evidence behind."
Some excerpts:
The spring of 2021 is different from the spring of 2020, though. Scientists know a lot more about how COVID-19 spreads—and how it doesn’t. Public-health advice is shifting. But some progressives have not updated their behavior based on the new information.... Some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning....
Scientists, academics, and writers who have argued that some very low-risk activities are worth doing as vaccination rates rise—even if the risk of exposure is not zero—have faced intense backlash. After Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, argued in The Atlantic in March that families should plan to take their kids on trips and see friends and relatives this summer, a reader sent an email to her supervisors at the university suggesting that Oster be promoted to a leadership role in the field of “genocide encouragement.”
Green spends some time discussing left-liberal Somerville, Massachusetts:
In Somerville, a local leader appeared to describe parents who wanted a faster return to in-person instruction as “f***ing white parents” in a virtual public meeting; a community member accused the group of mothers advocating for schools to reopen of being motivated by white supremacy. “I spent four years fighting Trump because he was so anti-science,” Daniele Lantagne, a Somerville mom and engineering professor who works to promote equitable access to clean water and sanitation during disease outbreaks, told me. “I spent the last year fighting people who I normally would agree with … desperately trying to inject science into school reopening, and completely failed.”
As most Americans prepare to go back to normal, Green says in her conclusion, lockdown-addicted progressives "are left, Cassandra-like, to preach their peers’ folly."
Nice to see progressives finally portrayed, accurately, as stubbornly refusing to listen to science, and addicted to restrictions as evidence of their good citizenship.
But also nice to see a mainstream publication say: everyone else is going back to normal.