Quit gaslighting us elite groupthink drove the COVID disaster

Five years since the COVID-19 pandemic hit our shores and forced us into our homes, we’re in the midst of a strange sort of denialism.You may remember schools being shuttered, small businesses being destroyed, and small children developing speech impediments because they were unnecessarily forced to wear masks.I certainly do.But now it turns out no one supported any of that, and none of it was anybody’s fault.It’s not just Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who’s been popping up every few weeks to lie that she super-duper, really and truly wanted schools open in 2020 and 2021, despite actually being the villain who kept the poorest kids out of classrooms for years.Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait and others have attempted it, too.Now influential economist Tyler Cowen says we’re being too hard on the people who caused us so much needless pain and misery.“A lot of people do not want to admit it,” he wrote this week in the Free Press, “but when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right.”Cowen weaves many unrelated pandemic measures together into a narrative that neatly absolves the elites of blame.Yes, Operation Warp Speed produced a vaccine quickly — but no, most of the economic activity our businesses lost was not “going away in any case,” as he asserts.Sure, he admits, “most states should have ended the lockdowns sooner” — then claims they “mattered less” than we all recall.Furthermore, he declares, “those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.”Gaslighting at its finest.When our family fled for Florida in January 2022, my children were still forced to mask between bites as they ate their lunches outside on the frozen ground at their New York City public schools.New York and California have still not recovered from their long forced shutdowns.

Their unemployment rates have remained stagnant since the start of the pandemic.Meanwhile, une...