I know this is going to be difficult for many of you to read. Due to COVID restrictions, many of you lost your businesses and your livelihoods. Many of you lost your parents and then were denied even saying goodbye at funerals, which were banned. Your children lost their senior year, their freshman year, their first dance, their first kiss, the chance to make a friend. Their grades plummeted, their self-confidence followed, and many of them sunk into deep depression and anxiety, which they still struggle with today.
I know this happened to you because several of those things happened to me. All of us have suffered greatly. And all the while we were shouting to anyone who would listen, “Masks are useless! Children need school! We are essential!” But no one did listen. We were forced to get a vaccine we didn’t want, or we lost jobs because we wouldn’t bend the knee and act against our consciences.
They poured sand into skate parks.
They arrested people for walking on the beach.
They masked two-year-olds.
And now, now that it’s all over and the data is in and everything they forced us to do turned out to be as useless as teets on a bull, they want us to grant them amnesty. No, really!
Emily Oster writing in The Atlantic penned an op-ed entitled, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” The subtitle made bile rise in my throat: “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”
Lady, I don’t need to forgive anyone, especially anyone who hasn’t asked for forgiveness. You would think that someone who wants this amnesty, as she calls it, would first apologize. She didn’t. Let’s look at what she did write.
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
Wow, Emily. You really screwed up your kid. You should beg for his forgiveness first. That boy is probably going to suffer the consequences of the deep fear of others that his mother implanted in his mind at the tender age of four. He’s going to need therapy to overcome it. He probably lost friends at school too when he went back due to that fear. I remember having to tell my 6-year-old not to hug our priest, a thing he didn’t understand (he ignored me). I wanted to off myself just for saying “don’t hug” to my little boy. Luckily, our priest was gracious and told me not to worry about it, though the stress on him was immense, having to visit the elderly and care for the sick.
Oster continued,
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
The reason you didn’t know is because you didn’t listen to us. And you didn’t even listen to at least 100 years of known human knowledge that would have informed you that cloth masks have no hope of keeping anyone from getting an airborne virus. You didn’t know because you refused to listen. You didn’t know because you didn’t want to know. You preferred to take the side of politically motivated, power-hungry politicians on a mission to take the seat of power. You willingly didn’t know. You chose your ignorance and you did it to be “right” and “virtuous” at the expense of the truth.
Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.
The data was in LONG before any of you admitted you were wrong. Here in New York, while Kathy Hochul was yukking it up in bars unmasked, our children were suffering with dirty gags on their faces for eight hours a day in school. The spread was at 2% in schools and 75% at home and out at bars and restaurants where all the adults were having the time of their lives while the children suffered. You didn’t even say you were sorry when the Supreme Court of New York declared it unconstitutional. Instead, your side supported an appeal and our children were enjoined from removing the masks while everyone else walked around bare-faced.
We told you weeks into “at-home learning” that it was a failure. No one listened. We told you that our children weren’t learning and the teachers weren’t teaching, opting instead to give written instructions and take the rest of the day off. We were called “lazy” and accused of day drinking. We were called bad parents who wanted babysitters for our kids. We were told that we should not only work our regular jobs but also teach their class material if they couldn’t keep up. We will not forget this.
Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.
“Someone” wasn’t proven right, dear. The right was proven right. The left was proven wrong. Let me speak plainer. Democrats were wrong on EVERY POINT. Every. Single. One. Your “team” was wrong. Our team was right. And we tried to tell you. We tried to talk to you rationally and in response you threatened us with our jobs. You advocated for us to be kept out of society, out of restaurants, banned from theater, banned from every social event because we would not bend the knee to your mad demands. And now, you want to just forget all about who was right and who was wrong! That’s convenient.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
Ma’am, you have me all wrong. I’m not interested in “I told you so” gloating. What I want is retribution. There is no “moving forward” without jail time for the people who did what they did to our liberty. The only way forward is through trials. We want discovery, we want evidence on the table, and we want accountability. We want a jury of your peers to decide what fate awaits those of you who killed seniors with your insane policies of putting Covid-positive patients in nursing homes, fired nurses for not taking useless vaccines, lied to us about what those vaccines would do, and retarded the development of babies for three years–babies who now have speech delays due to never seeing anyone’s mouths move for three years. We don’t want to gloat. We want revenge.
If you think the internet conversations you’ve been in are “unpleasant and heated,” you better hope we don’t get the tribunals for crimes against humanity that we want.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. 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. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.
There will be no forgiving the attacks on our liberty. I do not forgive the government declaring privately owned businesses “non-essential.” I do not forgive being called a “murderer” for not wanting to wear a mask wherever I go. I do not forgive the people who terrorized my family members and made them fear for their jobs over an experimental vaccine that DOES NOT WORK. You want me to move on? The answer is a solid, HELL NO. There will be no moving on until the people who implemented the policies and the people who championed them pay a steep price. Until then, I will hold this grudge forever. You people encouraged family members to reject each other. YOU DID THAT, EMILY! YOU!
Lauren Chen found an old tweet of Oster’s that suggested family pressure to coerce people into taking vaccines. “Individual family pressure,” she wrote. “Maybe vaccine requirements for things you want to do (domestic air/train travel, work, sports events: yes. We can have those without shame.”
Forgiveness usually comes after an apology.
I see no apology in this piece.
Remember how you encouraged family members to pressure each other and the unvaxxed to be fired?
Perhaps a little “I’m sorry for that” would be a good place to start. pic.twitter.com/cvuqq0saar
— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) October 31, 2022
Speaking of heated, I’m getting a little hot under the collar picturing ropes and trees so let’s take a moment to laugh. This gentleman summed it up nicely.
This video is in response to the @TheAtlantic article about “pandemic amnesty” and it’s a much watch. This man is so right on. pic.twitter.com/ZuuA9tIloD
— Just Mindy 🐊 (@just_mindy) October 31, 2022
Oster continued her unhinged plea for all of us to just forget that she advocated for the cannibalism of her neighbors’ lives.
Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.
Our children wouldn’t have needed to recover IF YOU HAD LISTENED TO US THREE YEARS AGO. You can go back to March of 2020 right here on PJ Media’s VIP service and go listen to my podcasts starting in March and moving on and you will hear me singing the same tune I’m singing today. I HAVE NOTHING to apologize for. I never advocated to take away Oster’s liberty or job or life if she wouldn’t bow to my demands. That was her and others like her doing it to US. And now they want amnesty? They want to be given a pass like it never happened. Oh, sweetheart, that is a ship that will sink before it gets out of the harbor. I don’t know anyone on the right side that has one ounce of forgiveness reserved for the COVID maniacs. Not one.
Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.
When I read this paragraph to Mr. Fox I got as far as “neglected their healthcare” before he was shouting, “We didn’t neglect it–we were told NO! We weren’t allowed to go to the doctor for regular checkups or outpatient procedures!” He is right, as Mr. Fox always is. This is gaslighting to the extreme. Do they think we have forgotten that cancer grew unnoticed in our friends and family members because they were stopped from going in for regular visits? And this woman is worried about measles vaccines. People are literally dying today because their cancer did not get diagnosed until it was too late. See how she skipped over that troubling fact?
The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.
The choices you made for all of us, Professor Oster, were not “complicated.” They were evil. And we are a people who will not tolerate evil and we will not offer it amnesty. You showed us who you are. We believe you. And we will not rest until every one of you has experienced some form of retribution for what you have wrought on this country and your neighbors. We will not work with you. We are not your friends. We are not “together” with you and we will not be moving forward with you. We will do whatever we can to make sure you have no power to do the kinds of things you’ve done in the past to anyone ever again and we will constantly remind everyone of what you did. You shut down playgrounds, Emily. You stood by and watched mothers be arrested for taking their babies out to get fresh air and have some time on the swings. You are the baddies, here. Not us.
This article wasn’t really a plea for any kind of forgiveness. What it is is a plea for votes for Democrats. “We’re not that bad, you can trust us, see? We know we screwed up! We admit it! Just vote for us again and we’ll show you how changed we are.” It is the language of the abuser who shows up with flowers after beating you bloody the day before. We do not believe you and we will never give you the reins of power again As God as my witness, I will remind people of the perfidy of these tyrants as long as my fingers are able to press the keys on a keyboard. I will NEVER forget and I will NEVER forgive and I will certainly NEVER in a million years offer any type of amnesty to the people who destroyed our economy, our lives, our businesses, our futures, and our faith in our neighbors. May God have mercy on your souls because none of us will.
And btw, guess who retweeted this ridiculous article? Randi Weingarten, the head of the biggest teachers’ union in the country. It is because of her that the schools stayed shuttered. Randi, you’re at the top of the list for retribution, honey. There will be nowhere for you to run and hide when the right people take back the controls. And if the prosecutions here on earth never materialize, I’m not worried in the slightest that the King of the Universe won’t see to it that the afterlife for them is exactly what they had planned for us.
I agree with @ProfEmilyOster on this https://t.co/lXLjxRcj0E
— Randi Weingarten 🇺🇦🇺🇸💪🏿👩🎓 (@rweingarten) October 31, 2022