Our Ruling Class Doesn't Need a Pandemic Amnesty
...because no one is going to hold them accountable.
Emily Oster’s piece in the Atlantic calling for a “pandemic amnesty” is going viral on the Right. In response, furious people are bringing up memories of the pandemic when they were barred from going to funerals for relatives, couldn’t accompany their wife to a miscarriage appointment, or watched their children suffer social isolation and depression.
These people don’t want amnesty for their rulers. They want justice. But, I fear, they aren’t going to get it. If you want justice in this life you need to have power. And the American Right does not have it.
It is tragic but these proclomations of indignation miss the key point: none of the policy makers who wrecked the lives of billions during the global freak out are going to be held accountable. They don’t need amnesty because they are in little danger of ever facing any real punishment.
I predict that Dr. Anthony Fauci is going to die a quiet, comfortable death in his own bed with millions of dollars in the bank.
The precedent for all this is the USSR. None of the mass killers who starved, shot, and imprisoned tens of millions were ever held accountable by an international tribunal. Lenin’s body is still kept preserved and honored in Red Square. Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong died at the ripe old age of 82 after not one, not two, but three heart attacks. He received a week of national mourning in China.
Mao killed, by some estimates, somewhere in the neighborhood of 55 million Chinese during the Great Leap Forward. But, in the 1990s, a friend of mine reports that one of his teachers, a committed communist, had a large portrait of Mao in his office.
When it comes to the pandemic, Republicans mostly act as if it didn’t happen. GOP leaders virtually never express indignation or outrage at vaccine mandates, masking orders, or lockdowns. They might complain and furrow their brow, but that’s mostly just theater for the voter base. These same leaders mostly supported all of the ruinous policies that were imposed across the West. They might have wanted to tweak some of these policies at the edges, but most agreed fully with the core premise of the pandemic—the virus demanded radical and unilaterally imposed restrictions of civil liberties in the name of public health. On that front, only fringe figures are willing to take the opposite view.
After all, every single Republican member of Congress, with maybe a half dozen exceptions, is vaccinated for COVID. At the end of the day, everyone in the DC uniparty is on the same team. Republican Congressmen, on the whole, are more aligned with Fauci than they are with their voters.
Without a meaningful right-wing in America there is no possibility for holding the Swamp accountable for its crimes. The American Right, as yet, is still very weak and it holds very little power. Though, it should be noted, the cultural clout of the Right, when it isn’t being censored (and even when it is), far outweighs its relatively small footprint.
That is a hopeful sign and a good starting point but it also reveals the scope of the problem.
The most likely outcome moving forward is that everything in American life is going to get worse. The Left is going to become even more radical, more fierce, and more vicious towards its enemies. The more the establishment feels itseful under pressure, the more it will lash out.
This does not mean that the insane utopians who currently govern the West will secure a permanent victory, but it is a word of caution—there is no meaningful alternative yet anywhere in the Western world. The nascent right-wing turn among small groups of young men across the western world has not yet fully flowered. The Right needs time, focus, and leaders. All three qualities are in short supply.
Things can change quickly but it isn’t enough to simply forecast the inevitable collapse of the current ruling order. Of course it will eventually come apart. The question is when. And the answer to that question is by no means clear.