By Ted Anthony
The conversations went like this: It will be just a few days. It can be kept at bay. There will be some inconvenience, sure, but the world will merely be paused — just a short break, out of an abundance of caution, and certainly not any kind of major grinding to a halt. Certainly not for two years.
Certainly not for hundreds of thousands of Americans who were among us at that moment in mid-March 2020 — who lived through the beginning, watched it, worried about it (or didn’t), and who, plain and simple, aren’t here anymore.
“Just a temporary moment of time,” the man who was then president of the United States insisted. Just a few days. Just a few weeks. Just a few months. Just a few years.
The fact is that on March 12, 2020, no one really knew how it would play out. How could they?
Flattening the curve — such a novel term then, such a frozen moment of a phrase today — seemed genuinely possible two years ago this weekend, when Major League Baseball’s spring training games trickled to an end with their season suddenly postponed, when universities told students to stay away, when Congress — astonishingly — began to talk about whether it would be able to work from home.
“We would recommend that there not be large crowds,” the nation’s top infectious disease researcher told Congress two years ago Friday, presaging two years of arguments over that exact statement. His name was Anthony Fauci, and he would become one of Pandemic America’s most polarizing figures, caught between provable science and charges of alarmism and incompetence and malevolence, even occasionally from the former president himself.
And for a while, there weren’t large crowds. Except when there were.
For weeks in those early days, Americans in many corners of the republic all but shut down. Faces disappeared as masks went up against the invisible adversary — if you could actually obtain them. Hand sanitizer was squirted so liberally that some distilleries pivoted from whiskey to alcohol antiseptics. People discussed ventilator shortages over family meals. Zoom became, for the nation, a household word; suddenly your colleagues were arrayed on a screen in front of you like personalized, workaday “Brady Bunch” opening credits.
All these things were new once.
In the weeks that followed, as the scope of things revealed itself gradually, there were questions we knew to ask, and questions we didn’t.
The ones we knew to ask: How does it spread, and how easily? Can we keep it out? Can I even go outside safely? Should I wash my groceries? Will there be a vaccine, and if so, how quickly?
The ones we didn’t: How to combat the extreme mountains of mis- and disinformation surrounding the virus and the vaccines that emerged from the scientific community astonishingly quickly? How to manage the anger, and the national division, that poured from the political arena into the protracted virus discussion and burned in conversational trash fires across the land? How to navigate the emotional rubble of an entire generation of kids whose lives and educations would be upended?
Those questions are the ones that, right now, don’t seem outdated. They seem fresh and immediate, and they remain largely unanswered today — a time when it can be difficult to summon memories of the beginning of this thing because of all that’s happened since, and all that’s still happening.
The American memory is a strange beast. The nation, which is younger than most societies on the planet, loves to trumpet its storyline of action but has long had trouble reckoning with or even acknowledging its history — whether it be racial or military, gender or economic. Pandemic history, even in the two years since those days in March 2020, is hardly an exception.
Do you remember those moments when people were talking about working together, when daily life was thrown off its axis enough that Americans were, for a time, a bit gentler with each other? When the word “COVID” was barely used yet, and everyone was just talking about the coronavirus?
“If we avoid each other and listen to the scientists, maybe in a few weeks it will be better,” Koloud “Kay” Tarapolsi of Redmond, Washington, told The Associated Press on March 11, 2020.Exactly two years later, this week, she said of those early days: “I just wish we would have taken it more seriously.”
And now: More than 6 million souls lost across the world. In the United States, nearly a million dead — and the polarization that was already poking at the fabric of American society redeployed into pandemic anger, setting masked neighbor against unmasked one, creating a fertile petri dish to grow as-yet undiscovered brands of mistrust and misconception.
The thing about history is this: Sometimes we talk about “now” as if it were the culmination of all that came before — the actual destination of everything. What we often fail to consider is that “now” is just another junction along the track, another waystation en route to the next thing and the next and the next.
That goes for the “now” of March 2020, yes. But it also applies to the “now” of March 2022 as well. Looking back on the uniquely strange and bedeviling year of 2020 is useful — you try to learn from what came before — but it also affords the chance to think about something else: Two years later, how will we look at right now? How will we take the measure of what we are doing two years after it all began? It this thing anywhere near done? And what happens when it is?
“Who are we after this? Who are we after dealing with this situation that we’ve never dealt with before?” Hilary Fussell Sisco, a professor at Quinnipiac University who studies how people communicate in troubled moments, said precisely two years ago Saturday. “You find out who you are when a crisis hits.”
Have we?
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Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has written about American culture since 1990 and has overseen AP’s coverage of the pandemic’s impact on society. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted
Most Canadians may be unaware that a Citizen-Led Inquiry into Canada’s COVID-19 Response is underway. The first hearing which took place in Truro, Nova Scotia has already provided the five Inquiry Commissioners with hours of evidence to consider.
Hearings are also scheduled for Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Red Deer, Vancouver, Quebec City, and finally Ottawa. The second round of hearings starts Thursday, March 30 in Toronto. On the eve of this, the National Citizens Inquiry has released a statement from renowned Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Below in his message to the commissioners, Dr. Peterson outlines all the reasons this inquiry is so important.
Canada’s federal and provincial governments’ COVID-19 policies were unprecedented. These interventions into Canadians’ lives, our families, businesses, and communities were, and to great extent remain, significant. In particular, these interventions impacted the physical and mental health, civil liberties and fundamental freedoms, jobs and livelihoods, and overall social and economic wellbeing of nearly all Canadians.
These circumstances demand a comprehensive, transparent, and objective national inquiry into the appropriateness and efficacy of these interventions, and to determine what lessons can be learned for the future. Such an inquiry cannot be commissioned or conducted impartially by our governments as it is their responses and actions to the COVID-19 which would be under investigation.
The National Citizen’s Inquiry (NCI) is a citizen-led and citizen-funded initiative that is completely independent from government. In early 2023, the NCI will hear from Canadians and experts and investigate governments’ COVID-19 policies in a fair and impartial manner.
The NCI’s purpose is to listen, to learn, and to recommend. What went right? What went wrong? How can Canadians and our governments better react to national crises in the future in a manner that balances the interests of all members of our society?
Canadian psychologist, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson who is also an author, online educator, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto spoke out about the Canadian response to COVID-19.
Dr. Peterson’s prerecorded testimony was directed to the five Commissioners at the National Citizens Inquiry in Truro, Nova Scotia.
The National Citizen’s Inquiry Hearings Event in the city of Toronto, Ontario Canada.
This event takes place starting March 30th to April 1st 2023.
Hearings go from 9:00am – 5:00pm Eastern Time.
You can register to attend the event here.
The hearing schedule is here.
The journalists have fallen down on the job. To say the least.
Three years ago, all normal rights and liberties of the people were trampled on by governments everywhere. It was all for naught. The virus came and became endemic as it always would in any case. And as societies opened up gradually, we were left with unbearable carnage: economic, cultural, and public health. The damages continue to hammer the world in the form of health and economic losses, and now we face a growing financial and banking crisis.
One might assume that professional journalists would be all over this, digging into every nook and cranny to discover precisely how all this came to be. Alas, there is a weird game of pretend going on in the mainstream press: pretend lockdowns were fine, pretend the shots worked, and pretend that today’s shattered politics and economics have nothing to do with the outrageous actions that were perpetuated on people the world over.
As a result of this tremendously odd conspiracy of silence, the journalistic duty has fallen to people independent of the mainstream, writing for Brownstone, Substack, and a handful of other venues.
And yet, every once in a while, something does leak through in a large venue. That happened this weekend in the Wall Street Journal. The opinion page editor James Taranto took a trip to Georgia to talk with Governor Brian Kemp. The result is “Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Affable Culture Warrior.”
The thesis is that Kemp has been battling woke culture longer than anyone else while rarely getting the credit.
That’s interesting but not the real revelation of the piece. What it really does is dig deeply into the most interesting aspect of the last three years: how it came to be that Georgia was the first state to open following lockdowns and how the White House responded. On this subject, the piece absolutely breaks new ground, so much so that it is worth quoting the relevant passages here.
In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”
The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.
That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:
“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”
Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”
“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”
“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”
Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”
The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’ ”
At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”
Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”
What’s utterly remarkable here is that readers gain an inside look into the difficult spot into which Trump’s White House had placed Republican governors. The whole machinery of DC had been marshaled with Trump’s approval. The order read: “indoor and outdoor venues where people can congregate should be closed.” He issued this order on March 16 and expected full compliance, and then lobbied for trillions in welfare to the states to make sure they stayed locked down.
Only South Dakota with Kristy Noem refused. And for that she was dragged through the mud of media lies for two years because she allowed motorcyclists, for example, to organize and ride in her state. The fake studies coming out about the Sturgis bike rallies set a new low standard for real-time science.
Georgia is important because it was the first state to open. Trump tweeted his opposition to this move both in general and then, two weeks later, in opposition to Kemp’s opening.
Every bit of documentation absolutely contradicts Trump’s claim that he “left that decision up to the Governors” as a matter of his own intention. It was his intention to achieve what he later bragged he had done, which is “turned it off.”
I won’t belabor this anymore because we’ve covered this in more detail here and here.
And yet for weeks now, Trump has been telling visitors to Mar-a-Lago, and his coterie has backed him up, that he never locked down and only people like Kemp and DeSantis did this over his objections. Daily I get calls from people who are stunned that this outright attempt to falsify history is happening. But these days, it is just part of public life, I suppose.
This is why we must be grateful for people like Taranto for digging more deeply into the actual history of what happened in those fateful months from 2020 when life itself was completely upended by dreadful decision-making from the White House. If we had more journalists interested in what actually happened, rather than just pretending that either what happened was perfectly normal or that it didn’t happen at all, we would be far closer to getting to the truth, and making sure that such a calamity never repeats itself.
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