The Economist, a pro-war rag most famously read for filth by Vladimir Lenin, decided to post an embarrassing screed by Frances Lee, a Princeton political scientist (still not a real science) and co-author alongside fellow not-a-scientist Stephen Macedo of the pitifully revisionist history In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us in which they proudly boasted that they didn’t talk to actual “experts,” such as doctors who actually treated COVID-19 patients or scientists with hands-on experience. Instead, they read a bunch of deceptive garbage found on Twitter.
The Science of Chronic Incorrectness
Macedo and Lee did however talk to Stanford economist and immature disinformation contrarian Jay Bhattacharya, who they publicly endorsed for Director of the National Institutes of Health. Jay is completely failing at this job and is utterly despised by the medical & scientific communities for his childish antics and constant failures. On a recent episode of the podcast We Want Them Infected, hosted by Dr. Jonathan Howard and Wendy Orent, they e-mailed Macedo for comment about Bhattacharya’s failures to lead a critical federal agency, and Stephen chose to feign ignorance over the “inner workings” of the NIH that are widely reported on.
For The Economist, Frances Lee writes “Ignore the doomsayers. American democracy is in good shape,” insisting that the “robustness of institutional arrangements” are working as intended. Ah, but just what are our political institutions doing currently? When they’re not slaughtering schoolgirls overseas, they’re starving children at home - something Carl Sagan warned would have grave impacts on our nation’s future in his 1995 book The Demon Haunted World.
Obviously, this wealthy white academic couldn’t give a damn about what is happening in the real world. That is not political “science,” that is the intoxication of willful ignorance. The wine mom atop her ivory tower is doing just fine, and isn’t that all that truly matters at the end of the day?
Pestilence & Apathy
This faux-intellectual apathy dominated much of the discourse around COVID-19. Many of the loudest voices couldn’t care less what the SARS-CoV-2 virus was actually doing to human bodies. They falsely convinced themselves that the virus was a harmless cartoon respiratory bug that merely went in one lung and out the other, and the only people dying were old and frail. Worse yet, they insisted that doctors, scientists, public health experts, and even teachers expressing concern and advocating for caution were corrupting society and our children. They demanded that everyone be as apathetic and detached as them.
Here’s a polite suggestion: If you truly don’t give a damn about COVID-19 and its impact on human health, can you do everyone a favor and shut your damn mouth? Even better, try listening to the people who do care - they might just know something that you missed reading nothing but unscientific junk on Twitter:
This advocacy for pandemic apathy ultimately contributed to the largest mass causality event in American history. This includes numerous children whose parents were misled into believing that COVID-19 was harmless to them and didn’t vaccinate. So, it’s not surprising that Lee’s apathy, which led her to co-write a fictionalized account to help construct a false and dangerous consensus against non-pharmaceutical interventions to combat a deadly and disabling virus, seamlessly transfers to the rest of American politics.
An honest inventory of American institutions would realize that they have been decaying for decades now. Our legal system has failed to punish literal war criminals and Wall Street crooks, the economy has become woefully lop-sided and dangerously unstable, our tech industry has abandoned innovation to instead construct a nightmarish surveillance hellscape built atop a mountain of exploitative scams, and younger generations are now convinced that hard work simply does not pay. Worst of all, we’re watching the demolition of federal regulatory authority in its entirety, because industry remains convinced that it has a God-given right to, in the noble pursuit of profit, straight up kill people.
Is this what Frances Lee considers to be a success? Or does she truly just not care?
The Sham of Political Science
The “science” that Frances Lee is professing is a calmmongering sort of anti-politics; the corrupting poison of toxic positivity. One in which the public’s concerns and tangible needs are shut out of national discourse entirely. We must uphold the faith that our economic betters simply know better, and shy away from acknowledging their amoral depravity. We must all aspire to be as ignorant and detached as Frances Lee and just let capital grind up our flesh without protest.
These are not the hallmarks of a healthy society, much less functioning politics. For laptop class academics such as Frances Lee, however, they’re just fine living in comfort and luxury atop a blood-soaked mountain of human suffering. To turn this nation around and move past a politics of depravity and death, that means useless frauds like Frances being shut out of the conversation entirely.
The lesson the nation learned from the COVID-19 pandemic was that of the false virtue of collective apathy. That giving a damn is a tasteless sin. This is not political science. This is the prison of living in an unhealthy fantasy.
Denial is the first stage of grief, and for many in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, they never moved past it. It’s clear by now that is all that Frances Lee knows. While I may not be a tenured Princeton academic, I am smart enough to know that we can and must start to do better.
Lovely screed--the *chosen* ignorance of most people I know does little to recommend humanity as a whole.
Onward thru the dystopic fog~