More people are noticing the logical incoherence

Pretty astonishing. From We often accuse the right of distorting science. But the left changed the coronavirus narrative overnight by Thomas Chatterton Williams. The British Grauniad is a completely paid up member of the social justice fascist brigade. There is not a reality denying belief they can't embrace.

But the inconsistency between pleading for people to give up their jobs and livelihoods in order to quarantine for the greater good while at the same exhorting people to get out and protest for social justice is too much for Williams. The red pilling begins.

Williams is still pretty hazy on the facts:

Police brutality is a different if metaphorical epidemic in an America slouching toward authoritarianism.

When in fact police shootings are down over the past three years pretty significantly and certainly down dramatically from ten and twenty years ago. If there is declining police brutality, surely that calls into question the empty sloganeering of slouching toward fascism. More English major preening than journalistic reporting.

Another fact check:

But poverty is also a public health crisis.

When the bottom quintile of Americans have a consumption level equal to that of the middle European quintile, it again calls into question just how much poverty is a public health crisis.

Williams, referencing his experience in France where he resides.

The country has only just begun to flatten the curve of deaths – nearly 30,000 and counting – which have brought its economy to a standstill. Yet even here, in the time it takes to upload a black square to your Instagram profile, those of us who move in progressive circles now find ourselves under significant moral pressure to understand that social distancing is an issue of merely secondary importance.

This feels like gaslighting. Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution. Many of us went much further, taking to social media to castigate others for insufficient social distancing or neglecting to wear masks or daring to believe they could maintain some semblance of a normal life during coronavirus. At the end of April, when the state of Georgia moved to end its lockdown, the Atlantic ran an article with the headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”. Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.

As a result of lockdowns and quarantines, many millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, depleted their savings, missed funerals of loved ones, postponed cancer screenings and generally put their lives on hold for the indefinite future. They accepted these sacrifices as awful but necessary when confronted by an otherwise unstoppable virus. Was this or wasn’t this all an exercise in futility?

“The risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism,” NPR suddenly tells us, citing a letter signed by dozens of American public health and disease experts. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19,” the letter said. One epidemiologist has gone even further, arguing that the public health risks of not protesting for an end to systemic racism “greatly exceed the harms of the virus”.

The climate-change-denying right is often ridiculed, correctly, for politicizing science. Yet the way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like … politicizing science.

What are we to make of such whiplash-inducing messaging? Merely pointing out the inconsistency in such a polarized landscape feels like an act of heresy. But “‘Your gatherings are a threat, mine aren’t,’ is fundamentally illogical, no matter who says it or for what reason,” as the author of The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols, put it. “We’ve been told for months to stay as isolated as humanely possible,” Suzy Khimm, an NBC reporter covering Covid-19, noted, but “some of the same public officials and epidemiologists are [now] saying it’s OK to go to mass gatherings – but only certain ones.”

Public health experts – as well as many mainstream commentators, plenty of whom in the beginning of the pandemic were already incoherent about the importance of face masks and stay-at-home orders – have hemorrhaged credibility and authority. This is not merely a short-term problem; it will constitute a crisis of trust going forward, when it may be all the more urgent to convince skeptical masses to submit to an unproven vaccine or to another round of crushing stay-at-home orders. Will anyone still listen?

Williams needs to be careful of the left wing twitter mob. What he is saying is exactly the questions being asked by conservatives.

Its as if there no trust that can be reasonably extended to experts or the media or the policy makers. Which is not a great place to be in.