“Let’s declare a pandemic amnesty” — Not

I’ll admit, I nearly spit out my coffee when I saw Brown Professor Emily Oster’s new headline in The Atlantic this morning. It’s the headline we’ve been waiting to see — and, in the revisionist, gaslighting style that’s become the journalistic norm on the response to Covid — it’s about the closest thing to an outright admission of guilt that we’ve seen since Covid began.

The article is about as pathetically transparent as it is self-serving. Gee, I wonder what Oster did and said during Covid for which she might want amnesty…

Oh…

There’s a lot wrong here. First, no, you don’t get to advocate policies that do extraordinary harm to others, against their wishes, then say “We didn’t know any better at the time!” Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and canceling those who weren’t as ignorant. The inevitable result would be a society in which ignorance and obedience to the opinion of the mob would be the only safe position.

Second, “amnesty,” being an act of forgiveness for past offenses, first requires an apology or act of repentance on the part of those who committed the offense. Not only has no such act of repentance been forthcoming, but in most cases, establishment voices like Oster’s have yet to stop advocating these same policies, much less admit they were wrong. With no accompanying act of contrition, these calls for “amnesty” in light of rapidly-shifting public opinion have a real ring of fascist leaders calling for “amnesty” after losing the War....<<<Read More>>>...