When I first came across Jonathan Chait’s new Atlantic piece, “Why the COVID Reckoning Is So One-Sided,” I assumed the answer would be that Democrats had been the ones relentlessly and tragically wrong about virtually everything during the pandemic. No such luck.

In Chait’s telling, the Left remains uncannily open-minded, always striving for truth, while the dogmatic Right remains hopelessly bogged down in “pathological incuriosity.” Even when conservatives are right, they’re right in the wrong way.

Recommended Stories

• NPR and PBS are begging for mercy. They don’t deserve it
• Virginia Republicans have a Winsome Earle-Sears problem
• Why the Education Department has to go

These days, people on the Left, Chait contends, “have engaged in searching self-reflection — on school closings, the lab-leak hypothesis, the political aftereffects, and other unanticipated lessons. Conservatives have used the occasion to engage in a round of self-congratulations and taunting of the libs.”

Now, you and I may believe dunking on libs who accused you of committing mass murder for going to church is perfectly normal behavior. Chait, though, is irked by all the “gloating” and “football-spiking.” Especially because a handful of left-wing outlets have published columns (five years late) begrudgingly admitting that lockdowns pushed by public health institutions and politicians failed.

Sure, in a “bout of confusion in the face of fast-moving events,” mistakes were made. But Democrats, Chait says, merely engaged in a good-faith debate. Which is why, I guess, Chait wrote a COVID-era piece headlined “American Death Cult,” accusing Republicans of deliberately murdering their own citizens. Nothing says “self-reflection” like accusing your political opponents of being psychopathic nihilists.

This smear, not incidentally, was the norm. Paul Krugman, then-dean of the New York Times edit page, accused Florida’s Ron DeSantis, the governor most resistant to lockdown policies, of being an “ally of the coronavirus.” Krugman also ceaselessly praised former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was sending thousands of elderly people to their deaths in New York.

It should also be mentioned, as well, that few “reckoning” pieces genuinely wrestle with the Left’s policy mistakes during COVID. The idea that a widespread reconsideration of pandemic-era policy is underway is a myth. Not one Senate Democrat voted for former Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya to be director of the National Institutes of Health despite his history of being correct on COVID policy. So, how much reflection has there really been?

Imagine, if you can, pro-Iraq War Republicans demanding Democrats coddle and praise them for retroactively admitting they were wrong without ever explicitly taking responsibility. That’s where we are. Virtually none of the hyperlinks Chait provides in his piece go beyond exploring the fallout. None really blame Democrats, other than perhaps Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times, who rightly points to the mendacity of our public health institutions, though she was one of the few longtime skeptics writing for major media.

Then again, Chait can’t even admit that COVID-era coverage was skewed. He takes offense at Mary Katharine Ham’s quip that it must “be wild to be a NYT reader/NPR listener and just learn YESTERDAY that everyone lied to you on purpose about the lab leak theory and Collins and Fauci were helping.” New York Times readers, he contends, had been “following this debate for years.” The problem is that conservatives are under the mistaken impression that “mainstream” media are as “ideologically rigid” as their own outlets.

To corroborate this claim, Chait leans hard into an anecdotal fallacy, ignoring the vast preponderance of coverage to focus on a smattering of skeptical columns. Anyone who was alive in 2020-2022 can tell you that the lab leak “debate” consisted of one side theorizing that the virus may have been manmade and the other accusing them of being slack-jawed conspiratorial bigots. 

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the New York Times noted in October 2021, “has been the target of conspiracy theorists who promote the idea that the novel coronavirus was made in a lab.” When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) brought up the lab leak hypothesis, the New York Times accused him of repeating an “unsubstantiated,” “fringe” “conspiracy theory.” Apoorva Mandavilli, a New York Times health reporter, tweeted that the theory had “racist roots” and wasn’t “plausible.”

The “mainstream” media were happy to follow.

Rather than conceding reality, Chait tries to both-side the pandemic response by pointing to bad predictions by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Hey, there’s no doubt Republicans said plenty of crazy things. But conceiving cures or being unduly optimistic about the end of the pandemic isn’t nearly as pernicious, immoral, or authoritarian as shuttering churches, cordoning off playgrounds, destroying businesses, censoring dissent, forcing thousands of Americans to miss the funerals of loved ones, or undermining the future millions of schoolchildren.

So, while Trump was “brainstorming weird medical ideas live from the White House,” his cures were aggressively covered and debunked (sometimes falsely) by the media. The truth-seeking Left rarely, if ever, scrutinized the diktats of Anthony Fauci. Any skepticism was treated as an assault on science itself. As it turns out, Fauci lied about the threshold for herd immunity, about masking, about the lab leak theory, and about many other issues. When three scientists — Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Bhattacharya — released the “Great Barrington Declaration,” questioning the efficacy of lockdowns and warning (correctly) about the damaging “physical and mental health impacts” of closing schools, Fauci colluded with others to suppress the document, plotting a “quick and devastating published takedown.” 

The Left media were happy to be unskeptical shills for public health officials.

The alleged “anti-reckoning” Chait mentions manifested in MAGA adopting leftist crackpots like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Fair enough. That’s a big problem. They own it. Still, we shouldn’t forget that it was dishonest, authoritarian public health mandarins who devastated public trust in institutions and made all that possible.

It is admirable to admit mistakes and rethink positions. But, as with other alleged “reckonings,” the Left is confessing to lesser transgressions to obscure the real ones.

The other day, for example, NPR CEO Katherine Maher was testifying before Congress and conceded that her network, which, for unknown reasons, is still funded by taxpayers, was “mistaken” and “should have covered the Hunter Biden [laptop] story more aggressively.”

This is like confessing to pickpocketing when you’ve just committed armed robbery. The problem wasn’t that NPR covered the Hunter Biden story or the Wuhan Institute with insufficient vigor. It was that it joined every other censorious journalist in the “mainstream” media, and most tech companies, to suppress it. NPR would not “want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” it informed readers in 2020. The “public editor” at NPR, an outfit that spread nearly every hare-brained Russia collusion theory without corroboration, said, “There are many, many red flags in that New York Post investigation.”

There were not.  

THE SECULAR CASE FOR RELIGIOUS REVIVAL

Chait ends his revisionist tale with perhaps his most gob-smacking assertion. Liberal America, he says, has an “allergy to dogma and an openness to reason,” which “are the very core of the creed. (Read John Stuart Mill.)” I’ve read Mill, and I don’t detect much “liberalism” within most of the contemporary Left. The paranoia, parochialism, statism, and enthusiasm for quack social science adopted by progressives have little to do with classical liberalism. Indeed, the doctrinairism and hysteria that are applied to virtually every issue these days are big reasons Democrats are now in a weaker position than they’ve been in for many decades.

And the COVID regime was a tragic manifestation of that illiberal mindset, a series of devastating mistakes for which the Left has yet to take responsibility.