Opinion

ROOKE: No Mercy, No Quarter: It’s Time To Crush The Branch Covidians

(Photo by Stefani Reynolds / AFP) (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

Mary Rooke Commentary and Analysis Writer
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Fifteen days to slow the spread turned into, please forget we stripped you of your human dignity.

Brown University economist Emily Oster’s recent Atlantic article asks for amnesty for the people who brutally attempted to subjugate Americans with vaccine and mask mandates, lockdowns, and social distancing idiocy on the grounds: “We didn’t know.”

She claimed that during the height of the Covid insanity, “most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.”

No, Ms. Oster, they weren’t.

Most decisions were made by people, like flight attendants and front desk clerks, whose normal job gave them extraordinary gatekeeping powers, which they used to kick families off flights and deny Americans with disabilities public services.

Government officials, doctors, and celebrities instructed their followers to cut ties with relatives who refused to wear masks or take the vaccine. And they listened. Uncles were uninvited from meeting their nephews, parents disowned their children, and grandparents died alone in nursing homes.

They threw decades of medical knowledge out the window and replaced it with political propaganda, like proposing people double-mask, closing elementary schools, and dropping patients from the organ donor list.

To her credit, Oster is herself in a position to issue forgiveness. She was one of the few voices in the center-left mainstream using data to push back against some Covid measures for children at the time, and she too suffered vitriol as a result of her clearly justified dissent.

But she asks too much of Americans who opposed school and business closures or cloth masks and were mocked and canceled into silence. In more civilized times, amnesty could be discussed. But granting impunity is for peacetime, and the U.S. is in the midst of a brutal cultural war. These people aren’t asking for forgiveness for crushing and humiliating – in some cases even financially ruining anyone dissenting from government-enforced Covid restrictions. They want immunity.

Americans deserve to see the Covid cultists, who gleefully championed death, take personal accountability for their ruthless enforcement of draconian measures.

Those who held Covid power gave Americans a choice: submit to the fear and panic or be labeled an untouchable. Kids were kept out of school, soldiers were separated from service, and family legacies were destroyed. There needs to be public accountability of those in power that refused to stop the destruction. (RELATED: It’s High Time We Make It Illegal For Kids To Be On The Internet)

“My brother & his wife were regulated to hospital parking lot while their daughter lay dying in ICU. He was giving docs permission to amputate her arm via phone in last effort to save her when the pizza delivery guy walked by them into hospital unchecked,” Twitter User Let Them Eat Cake (@bclpbclp) wrote in a thread about the devastating effect of Covid restrictions.

“After she died, the hospital shut down all deliveries and refused to allow them to have her body shipped home for a funeral (was in NC, live in SC). Said it would be months. Had to get a lawyer & SC govt officials involved to get body released (yes, really happened),” the user added. “Then I had to sit with my mom and rest of our family as she watched a choppy Facebook video of her son and his wife burying their daughter. As a Christian, I know I’m to forgive, but I gotta be honest, I’m just not there yet.”

“Days before Christmas last year, my parents disinvited my family from the family celebration because they were afraid my young children would infect them with omicron. We have no other family,” Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) said.

“I was called a parasite. Spat on. I could not get the vaccine because of a chronic condition and not a single place accepted the letter from my doctor – the head of the dept of a major hospital in NYC,” Ooana Trien (@ooana) said. “I lost access to everything I loved. I had to leave NYC. My home since 1996. Had to leave my elderly parents behind. I did this alone. I’m an only child. Single. And 44. I lost two very important years and likely my chance to ever have a child. I lost friends. I lost my sense of safety. I lost my sense of trust in the basic decency of people.”

They wanted to ruin your life and make it impossible to keep your job, see your family, travel, and get healthcare, but now, because kids can’t read and a bloodbath awaits the Democrats in the midterms, they want amnesty for brutally enforcing the regime’s Covid mandates.

Americans excel at many things, but we have never been good at forgiving tyrants.

Nor should we be. People suffered real, tangible loss over the past two years when civil liberties were discarded by Covid thugs serving their despotic rulers. The American way of life demands justice and accountability from those who caused the harm.