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A more honest headline for The Atlantic’s recent demand for amnesty over the pandemic response would have been: “Sorry, Not Sorry.”

The sarcasm best represents the article’s smug sentiment.

Author and economics professor Emily Oster inferred that we should just sweep the rubber bullets, totalitarianism, job or jab mandates, medical apartheid, militarisation of the police, mass psychosis and government overreach under the carpet.

Excuses, Excuses

Defending “pandemic choices,” Oster wrote, “In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing.”

Implying that there is no need to hold the commissars of COVID accountable, she added, “Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others are preventing us from moving forward.”

Still backing the so-called “vaccines”, Oster preached hard against misinformation.

She then landed her article in the dismissive “both sides were just as bad as each other, so we should just move on” zone.

Notably, Oster blamed the pandemic, and not the pandemic response for “creating many problems that we still need to solve.”

An important distinction, though clearly not one important enough for The Atlantic to make.

Unjust

The (now viral) Oster piece is a slap in the face for many people, who, like my father-in-law, lost his job to a “gross misconduct” charge.

He was fired after years of dedicated service simply because he refused to play along with daddy government’s unjustified medical mandates.

Oster’s words are also of little comfort to my daughter who, in her first year in the workforce, experienced fat cats in the bloated bureaucratic caste forcing her to choose between medical coercion, and losing three months of income.

Worse, Oster’s exaltation of the secular gospel of niceness and nuance blurs black-and-white issues.

With an unsympathetic jackboot, she kicks the concepts of boundaries and accountability to the curb.

Discounting “vax or the axe” victims, the vile, militant embrace of segregation, discrimination, denouncements, and “papers please” domestic passports, she fails to provide any reasonable ground for moving forward.

Nowhere in her demand for forgiveness does Oster demand an end to “vaccine” mandates, or the reinstatement of workers who had been wrongfully dismissed.

Oster would have hit a better tone if she acknowledged that for many victims, solutions start where restitution begins.

Give the unvaccinated their jobs back!

Then include compensation for all the unnecessary suffering, and time unjustly spent in COVID Communism’s version of a Soviet gulag.

Chiming In

Unsurprisingly, co-Atlantic contributor and COVID policy apologist David A. French gave Oster’s article five stars, writing on Twitter:

“This is an excellent piece from someone who was, in fact, quite right about many aspects of COVID policy (including opening schools, for example). Critics are forgetting the focus of this piece is that period when we knew so little. There *should* be grace.”

He, like Sky News commentator Chris Smith, and others who failed the fourth estate by band-wagoning the abuse of power, have a lot to hide from, and a lot they want hidden.

At the height of COVID, French — a favourite among “vax or the axe” segregate-so-we-can-congregate cult — wrote an extensive op-ed, damning dissenters as extremists.

Writing for The Dispatch in August 2021, French appallingly declared,

“The remaining vaccine holdouts are growing more extreme, and significant parts of the Christian Right are enabling, excusing, and validating Evangelical behaviour that is gravely wrong and dangerous to the lives and health of their fellow citizens.”

Weaponizing the oft-misused term “anti-vaxxer”, French then proclaimed that the assertion of civil liberties, such as religious freedom and informed consent, was ‘extreme and dangerous.’

He then charged headlong into the heresy of natural theology, stating that refusing the “vaccine” was the equivalent of refusing Christ: “A sincere desire not to take a shot does not equate with a sincere expression of orthodox Christian faith.”

Grotesquely, like many in his camp, French has gone from: “You’re not a Christian if you refuse the vax,” to “you’re not a Christian if you don’t forgive us for pushing the vax.”

Now, in lieu of an apology, and repentance, David French is demanding “vax” victims, and dissenters — that he and others defamed — show “grace.”

Overkill

Calling French out, The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham was right to post screenshots in a Twitter thread with this retort:

 

Right again was Caldron Pool contributor and cancelled medical professional Dr Jereth Kok, who argued that ignorance is no excuse for abuse:

“By July 2020, the main facts were known. The severity of the virus was known and the harm of lockdowns was known. The “ignorance” excuse applies only to the first 6 months of 2020. Everything after that was not done in a state of ignorance.”

Jereth added,

“You don’t do crazy, destructive things in ignorance. It’s like- “there might be a dangerous terrorist hiding in that village, but we’re not totally sure. Let’s nuke the village to be safe.” The inability of vaccines to stop spread was known in July 2021. The serious adverse effects of the vaccines were known by June 2021. Yet all the mandates took effect in October 2021 onwards.”

If French and those like him are right with God, they’d repent, and seek forgiveness, not demand happy ignorance.

Accountability

If French is indeed as theologically literate as his work suggests, surely he understands the great value in the healthy Christian Anselm’s axiom: ‘Fides Quaerens Intellectum’ — faith seeks understanding. A 1,000-year-old praxis reflecting the Holy Spirit’s gift of discernment spoken of in 1 Corinthians 12, and 2 Corinthians 10:4-5. Not to mention 1 Corinthians 2:15, ‘The spiritual man tests all things.’

See also John 16:13 and John 7. Particularly John 7:18-24’s: ‘Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgement.’

Despite the smug shifting of the onus of responsibility by The Atlantic, French, and those who served at the pleasure of Big Pharma’s golden goose, there can be no amnesty without accountability.

No doubt Oster, French, Smith, and The Atlantic — all members of the fourth estate — agree that democracy dies in darkness.

Being forgiven is not a tool to keep sin hidden.

Being forgiven requires acknowledging there is fault.

Additionally, while most things can, and should be forgiven, there are some things that must not be forgotten.

As a family member, and nurse by profession, said to me the other day, “The woke herd all seem unable to discern between good policy and policy that makes them feel good.”

This sums up the masses, and their willingness to go along with arbitrary government tactics, happy to stay ignorant about both short, and long-term consequences of COVID overreach.

Lessons have to be learned. Good government must bring that which has been hidden into the light.

There can be no free pass for pandemic fanaticism.

Give bad government no quarter, or this insidious inch will turn into a murderous mile.

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Originally published at Caldron Pool.