The DNC's Pandemic Revisionism

Democrats want you to believe that they had nothing to do with America keeping its schools closed longer than any peer country.

Christopher Dilts | Bloomberg

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I watched much of the Democratic National Convention. It was as nauseating as it was risible, four consecutive days of pious platitudinous pablum capped off by a Kamala Harris speech consisting of nothing more than poll-tested and focus-grouped cliches. Speaker after speaker pedaled lie after lie—hardly unexpected considering there’s no incentive to tell the truth when a pliant, adulatory, gushing media class has your back and will even help you rewrite history.

Arguably the most ludicrous revisionism featured at the DNC concerned the pandemic. In a coordinated effort to spin 2020-2023 as a story of Democratic managerial competence, the Party faithful took to the podium and brazenly campaigned about the virtues of their COVID-19 record¹ while presenting Kamala Harris as some kind of savior who delivered America from despair.

The Democrats are apparently confident that the nation’s supposed exuberance over their new nominee will help the Party retroactively condition voters into substituting a bunch of bullshit for the truth, which is that 1) despite endless warnings from the media about the GOP’s authoritarian motives, the pandemic was essentially a case study in left-wing authoritarianism, with powerful vested interests working together to censor dissent and demonize dissidents, shutting down policy debates by passing off value judgments as empirical science to which absolute deference was required of all, refusing to give certain stories and facts oxygen for fear of lending credence to conservative talking points; and 2) virtually everything about the pandemic was tainted by partisan interests because a cartel of liberal journalists, public health officials, teachers, and politicians decided to exaggerate covid risks and tank the country so as to undermine Trump’s re-election chances²—even if it meant putting the welfare of children on the back burner.

Incredibly, multiple speakers at the DNC pretended as though Democrats had nothing to do with the evidence-free pandemic policies horrendously detrimental to kids that were imposed long past the point at which the net negative far exceeded any positive impact, with some — including Joe Biden himself — even claiming that it was only thanks to Kamala Harris that schools reopened.

Utterly absurd and absolutely infuriating.

On July 7, 2020, just one week after the American Academy of Pediatrics came out in support of reopening schools, President Trump held a series of events at the White House with Betsy DeVos, his secretary of education, to demand that schools open. “We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools,” he said. “It’s very important for our country. It’s very important for the well-being of the students and the parents. So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on: Open your schools in the fall.”

“The effect of Trump’s declaration,” writes ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis, “was instantaneous.” Teachers who were open to the idea of returning to the classroom suddenly did an about-face. The American Academy of Pediatrics “walked back its support” three days later.

This was not a coincidence. It was about politics.

A study out of Michigan State University found that when governors left it up to districts whether to have in‐​person education in the fall of 2020, the “decisions were more tied to local political partisanship and union strength than to COVID-19 severity.” A study from Brown University was even more explicit, finding that “the decision to return students to in-person classes this fall was strongly correlated with the county-level share of the vote won by Donald Trump in 2016.”

Contrary to the conventional understanding of school districts as localized and non-partisan actors, we find evidence that politics, far more than science, shaped school district decision-making. Mass partisanship and teacher union strength best explain how school boards approached reopening.

One editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine cited the “impending U.S. federal election” as a factor that “limited the ability of public health practitioners to seriously discuss the trade-offs involved in COVID-related decisions” like school closures. Read: cost-benefit analysis of covid restrictions wasn’t permitted by the public health establishment due to fear of hurting the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects.

For decades, powerful unions have represented teachers’ interests, but the pandemic made it clearer than ever the total dissonance between what teachers’ unions want and what’s best for students.

Prolonged school closures and the not-at-all-inevitable harm perpetrated on children nationwide was a decision based not on health, but on partisanship, in no small part because of the symbiotic relationship between teachers unions and the Democratic politicians they fund. As Naomi Wolf writes in The Bodies of Others, school boards with new, broad powers and a rather ridiculous authoritarian zeal used seemingly centralized scripts and policies to keep schools closed and bully concerned parents—even requesting that the FBI investigate them as “domestic terrorists,” just as dissident parents were targeted in the Soviet Union, and just as they are today in Communist China.

Hoping to bring attention to the damage being done to kids, Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg became the lead author in a study of schools published by the CDC in its “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” in January 2021. The study found that covid incidence in open schools was 37% lower than in the surrounding community. Logically, Høeg believed this study would lead to the prompt reopening of schools, or at the very least start a dialogue focused on doing so. However, “the CDC actually came out with stricter reopening guidelines following our study, and that was the opposite of what I had expected,” she told Tablet’s Alex Gutentag.

Dr. Høeg would later learn that the CDC had considered input from teachers’ unions over the very science the organization had published in its own journal.

In July 2022 it was revealed that now former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky met with parents just once leading up to the release of school reopening guidance. On several occasions, Walensky claimed she’d consulted parents’ needs for the guidance despite her calendar showing the sole 30-minute meeting. And as parents were granted just one session, teacher unions had constant access to her and other high-level CDC officials while influencing last-minute changes to guidelines.

On July 18, 2020, about a week after the American Academy of Pediatrics walked back its support (presumably) in response to the Trump administration advocating for schools to open in the fall, the New York Times published one of its many sensationalist pandemic headlines: “Older Children Spread the Coronavirus Just as Much as Adults, Large Study Finds.” The subheading read, “The study of nearly 65,000 people in South Korea suggests that school reopenings will trigger more outbreaks.”

It was, of course, a bunch of bull. Some researchers tried to bring attention to the study’s conclusions, which weren’t supported by the findings themselves.

“That study had methodological flaws that several of us pointed out,” Joseph Allen, the director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s school of public health, said. “But the headline took off.” Even Zeynep Tufekci, a notorious mask proponent and leading member of the covid cult, tweeted, “I personally know parents who changed their whole next year because of the article. ... The takeaway people got was 10-year-olds can transmit as much as adults.”

For the New York Times, this was standard operating procedure. Par for the course. And it even contradicted the paper’s own reporting: Just 18 days earlier an opinion column written by epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo and pediatrician Joshua Sharfstein stated:

The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that the harm to children from not having in-person education outweighs the risk. Children are 24 percent of the American population but account for only 2 percent of Covid-19 cases. In the United States, school-age children have been hospitalized at a rate of 0.1 per 100,000, compared with 7.4 per 100,000 for adults ages 50 to 64. Very few deaths among children have been reported. … Children play less of a role in the spread of Covid-19 than in the spread of influenza.

On August 31, 2020, another alarmist article was published by the Times: “U.S. Coronavirus Rates Are Rising Fast Among Children.” Sociologists pointed out that this was wildly misleading as well.

So it went, with rags like those above selling belief instead of facts, the steady stream of yellow journalism and its contradictions further eroding trust in the press during a time when trust in public institutions was imperative.

With its new business model centered on error-ridden moral panics, the mainstream media has arguably done more harm to the country since 2016 than during all the years before then, going all the way back to the days of the penny press. Indeed, you could make the case that during the pandemic, nothing was so pernicious as the mainstream media’s perverse efforts to normalize toxic political tribalism and tabloid-like terror headlines, working within a defined ecosystem to impress a narrative upon the population while devoting remaining resources on the wrongness of the rival faith.

The resulting epistemic free-for-all in which the truth became wholly a matter of perspective and agenda is why legacy outlets rallying to the colors in support of anything and everything that came out of Fauci’s mouth, including the diktats pushed down by subservient government officials, played a key role in generating and perpetuating the delirium that warped parents’ perception of the danger covid posed to both themselves and their kids.

We witnessed what happens when the hazards of risk misperception are more significant than the actual risks of a novel coronavirus, and a framework of “permanent emergency” is allowed to persist long past the point of there being any meaningful emergency at hand: The gradual erosion of constitutional rights and civil liberties under the pretext of “an abundance of caution” and “public safety,” and the sacrificing of adolescent welfare.

Fear is the lifeblood of authoritarianism. As the strongest of emotions, it’s capable of overriding the mind, making it the preferred tool with which to psychologically manipulate the public and to otherwise reify manufactured hysteria that those in power rely upon to “justify” subversion of freedoms.

In his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, the philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm identified how the human craving for security and stability in the face of disorder and uncertainty gives rise to authoritarianism. Now, decades later, numerous studies have empirically shown how insecurity is linked to the rise of autocrats and the erosion of democracy.

One need not be conversant in history to realize as much. It is enough to simply survey the present and reflect on the recent past.

Fear is, after all, what made possible the pandemic’s techno-fascistic culture, with its bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislation, cost-benefit analysis, or scientific citation; and how a confederacy of Big Tech robber barons, the security state, public health officials, the mainstream media, and unscrupulous politicians orchestrated and executed what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. aptly described as “2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.”

Stoking fear and paranoia by terrifyingly narrating the pandemic in the direst of terms, sensationally reporting on new cases but never recoveries, new hospital admissions but never discharges, this confederacy so badly warped people’s understanding of covid risk that in heavily Democratic areas like Los Angeles kids were told to wear masks while playing instruments and jogging.

It was kids who bore the brunt of the omnipresent fear campaign their elders so easily succumbed to and subsequently propped up. Not only did they tell kids that they might kill grandma by hugging her, but they subjected them to a simulated atmosphere of a deadly plague reinforced by mask and social-distancing policies and a never-ending stream of state-sponsored propaganda and doom-laden media commentary. Previously rational adults of sound mind and constitution devolved into paranoid schizoids who led young people to operate with the understanding that they were waking up each day to a world in which invisible, airborne particulates threatened their existence 24/7—this, even though the risk of serious covid illness in children was always comparable to their risk from the flu.

To the adolescent mind, fear might as well be a deadly pathogen. Early exposure to circumstances that produce persistent fear and chronic anxiety can have lifelong effects on brain architecture, and not even a toddler’s limited capacity for storing retrievable memories can inoculate the brain from the ramifications of an overactive amygdala. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether or not someone can recall later on in life being afraid as a kid; if the circumstances from which the fear is derived persist long enough, the damage is done.

There’s extensive and growing scientific evidence that excessive exposure to fear at a young age can impair early learning and adversely affect later performance in school, the workplace, and the community. Multiple studies in humans have documented problems in cognitive control and learning as a result of “toxic stress,” which, when chronic, can contribute to permanent memories forming the basis of pediatric maladaptivity, disrupt the efficiency of brain circuitry, and lead to both immediate and long-term physical and psychological problems. This is especially true when stress-system overload occurs during the most sensitive periods of brain development (typically ages 1-3).

This same stress-system overload can significantly diminish a child’s ability to engage in typical social interactions for the duration of life. Behavioral neuroscience research in animals tells us that the prefrontal cortex is highly sensitive to the detrimental effects of excessive stress exposure. For children, this leads to what’s known as “conditioned fear,” which is exactly what it sounds like: A learned tendency to perceive threats and risks even in familiar social circumstances, with the logical adaptation being a perception of the world as a hostile and threatening place.

The Democratic Party’s radical discontinuity with the recent past is about saving face and deflecting responsibility so as to avoid paying a price at the ballot box come November. These people eschewed rational cost-benefit analysis in favor of political gamesmanship, leading a concerted campaign of censorship and demonization of dissenting voices in support of premises that have had devastating consequences.

Today, our public education system is a shit show. The collapse of educational pathways and structures has left urban school systems in shambles with chronic absence, horrible test scores, and student violence the new norm. Over a million students have left U.S. public schools and enrollment continues to decline. And pediatric hospitals are still seeing enormous surges in mental health emergencies and suicidal thoughts.

Dysfunction among children and adolescents has arguably never been worse, and now we’re dealing with an entirely foreseeable academic, social, and psychological disaster that will reverberate through society for years to come. Yet, not a single official or politician responsible has resigned, apologized, or been held accountable in any way, and the people who pushed the policies leading to this disaster have refused to engage in any self-reflection. Public health experts, academics, Democratic politicians, teachers unions, social justice activists, and the mainstream media—the fault lies with them. They cared more about “resisting” Trump, virtue signaling, and petty political gratification than about adolescent welfare.

Ultimately, the revisionist history featured at the DNC is part and parcel of what Park MacDougald calls the Democratic Party’s “big gamble,” which is that “their near-total monopoly on America’s messaging and communications apparatus will be enough to create a new reality, completely independent of the one we live in, that convinces just enough people to drag Kamala over the finish line.”

And it’s unfortunately looking like it might be a good bet.

1. They of course didn’t mention that Tim Walz was one of the worst “covid-maximalists” in the country. His dystopian record includes indoor and outdoor mask mandates, outdoor dining bans, the jailing of defiant open bar owners, a state of emergency that lasted 474 days, misspent relief funds, and a literal snitch line for reporting transgressions of the state’s innumerable and ineffective NPIs.

During his Wednesday night speech, Walz had the nerve to proclaim that “when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love, freedom to make your own health care decisions…[and] freedom to live the life that you want to lead.”

2. Connect the dots. It wouldn’t be the first time since calamity befell Democrats in 2016 that putatively righteous ends justified an array of troubling means.