Not A Chance: Atlantic Writer Begs For ‘Pandemic Amnesty,’ Forgiveness For COVID Tyranny

Are you ready to forgive and forget the COVID nuts who wanted to lock down the whole country, mentally stunted an entire generation of students, practically killed small businesses, and accused you of premeditated murder because you wouldn’t do things like wear a mask while raking leaves by yourself?

Probably not, but a writer for The Atlantic is requesting that the entire nation just move on from that insanity anyway.

Emily Oster, a professor at Brown University, published a story titled “Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty.”

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID,” Oster wrote.

Of course, as one Twitter user pointed out, the only reason Americans were kept in the “dark” was that the medical establishment, legacy media, and the Left worked hand-in-hand to demonize anybody who offered different viewpoints about COVID, its origins, or appropriate policies to handle the pandemic.

Those who lost their minds over COVID had no interest in seeing the light. Instead, their desire for power and a providential solution to the virus handed down from government bureaucrats blotted out any rational thinking.

In turn, untold misery ranging from drug overdoses, to education gaps, to elder abuse and so much more plagued the country — despite people warning such things would happen under lockdowns.

According to Oster, however, all should be forgotten because anti-freedom folks were allegedly only enacting those draconian policies — like siccing authorities on surfers out in California — because they wanted to help.

“But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society,” Oster said of government missteps.

Of course, that’s what the Left always says when their tyranny fails. Doing something for the “good of society” is often used as the rationale behind egregious acts — such as communist dictators killing millions or socialist governments impoverishing an entire nation.

This is not to compare America’s pandemic pandemonium with the same horrors of communism, but only to say that Oster’s excuse falls in the same line of thinking as those collectivist ideologies.

Leftists of all stripes believe that a centrally planned society run by experts is what’s best for the benefit of all mankind — despite countless examples of it ending horribly.

To that extent, Oster’s piece also asserts that the problem with COVID policies isn’t that the Left wanted government control of your life, but rather that those in charge were operating off faulty data.

If only they had better data, then the government could have made better decisions, she implies.

This, of course, is nonsense.

GOP Governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, and others looked at the data from all angles. They concluded that the best course of action was to re-open society and schools far earlier than what other experts were saying.

Now, conservatives want the Left to admit their mistakes. They want government leaders who enacted the misery to face political consequences. And they want to vote for politicians who will never repeat those mistakes.

The problem is that the worst offenders during the pandemic have yet to really admit they did anything wrong.

Folks like Governors Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Kathy Hochul (D-NY), Dr. Anthony Fauci, and so many more have never truly admitted that they were, by and large, wrong about COVID.

As recently as December 2021, Fauci still claimed, “Without a doubt, it is within our power and within our capability” to control COVID.

Hochul says she would do things like firing unvaccinated workers all over again. Whitmer recently falsely claimed she only shut down schools for three months.

Nonetheless, Oster wants us all to grant absolution to those officials anyway.

“We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty,” Oster claims. “We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.”

But true reconciliation requires three things from those requesting it: remorse for one’s actions, the admittance of guilt, and a firm commitment to not repeat those mistakes.

The Left, and Oster herself, haven’t done any of that.

They don’t regret their actions because they thought it was all in the best interest of the country. The Left doesn’t admit guilt because they blame evolving science for errors. There is no plan to avoid repeating their mistakes because doing so would mean admitting that their entire political philosophy is a failure.

The pandemic wasn’t the cause of the Left’s awful governing policies — it was always there. COVID just exposed those flaws.

The end result of a collectivist society is an unmitigated disaster in one form or another, while the excuse is always the same: “We did it for the greater good and based on the data at the time. We’ll get it right next time.”

Until the Left abandons the idea that government experts know best and should interfere in your life, there can be no “pandemic amnesty.”

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.