Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Shuck-and-jive from America’s broken thinking class, the people who pretend to know better than everybody else.

By now, everybody and his uncle has seen Emily Oster’s plea for “pandemic amnesty” in The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about… really… everything. Emily’s wazoo is so stuffed with gold-plated credentials (BA, PhD, Harvard; economics prof at Brown U) it’s a wonder that she could sit down long enough to peck out her lame argument that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

Emily wasn’t “in the dark.” She had access to the same information as the Americans who recognized that everything the public health authorities, the medical establishment, and many elected officials shoveled out about Covid and its putative remedies and preventatives was untrue, with a patina of bad faith and malice — especially when it was used to persecute their political adversaries.

These dissenters turned out to be “right for the wrong reasons,” she declared, the main reason being that they were not aligned in good-think with the Woke-Jacobinism of her fellow “progressives” at Brown U, and academics all across the land, who were righteously busy destroying the intellectual life of the nation, making it impossible for the thinking class to think.

Let’s face it: every society actually needs a thinking class, a cohort able to frame important issues-of-the-moment that require argument in the public arena to align our collective thoughts and deeds with reality. America used to have a pretty good thinking class, with a pretty good free press and many other platforms for opinion — all animated by respect for the first amendment to the Constitution.

The thinking class destroyed that by vigorously promoting a new censorship regime in every American institution, shutting down free speech and, more crucially, the necessary debate for aligning our politics with reality. Hence, America’s thinking class became the torchbearers of unreality, in step with the Party of Chaos which held the levers of power. This included the powers of life and death in the matter of Covid-19.

These were the people who militated against effective early treatment protocols (to cynically preserve the drug companies’ emergency use authorization (EUA) and thus their liability shields); the people who enforced the deadly remdesivir-and-ventilator combo in hospital treatment; the people who rolled out the harmful and ineffective “vaccines”; who fired and vilified doctors who disagreed with all that; and who engineered a long list of abusive policies that destroyed businesses, livelihoods, households, reputations, and futures.

How did it happen that the thinking class destroyed thinking and betrayed itself? Because the status competition for moral righteousness in the sick milieu of the campus became more important to them than the truth. In places like Brown U, what you saw was an escalating contest for status brownie-points, which is what virtue-signaling is all about. And the highest virtue was going along with whatever experts and people-in-authority said — the pathetic virtue of submission. Anything that got in the way of going along — such as differences of opinion — had to be crushed, stamped out, and with a vicious edge to teach the dissenters a lesson: dissent will not be tolerated!

Some thinking class. The case of Emily Oster should be particularly and painfully disturbing, since she affects to specialize, as an economist, on “pregnancy and parenting” (her own website declares), while the Covid regime of public health officialdom she supported instigated a horrendous pediatric health crisis that is ongoing — it was only days ago that the CDC added the harmful mRNA “vaccines” to its childhood immunization schedule for the purpose of conferring permanent legal immunity for the drug companies after the EUA ends, a dastardly act. Where’s Ms. Oster’s plea to the CDC to cease and desist trying to vaccinate kids with mRNA products?

The CDC is still running TV commercials (during World Series ballgames!) touting its “booster” shots when only weeks ago a top Pfizer executive, Janine Small (“Regional President for Vaccines of International Developed Markets”), revealed in testimony to the European Union Parliament that her company never tested its “vaccine” for preventing transmission of SARS CoV-2. The CDC under Director Rochelle Walensky is still extra-super-busy concealing or fudging its statistical data to obfuscate the emerging picture that MRNA “vaccines” are responsible for the shocking rise of “all-causes deaths” in the most heavily-vaxxed nations. In short, the authorities are to this minute still running their whole malign operation.

Notably, Ms. Oster’s plea for amnesty and forgiveness, showcased in The Atlantic, omits any discussion of accountability for what amounts to serious crimes against the public. A whole lot of people deserve to be indicted for killing and injuring millions of people. At the heart of her plea is the excuse that “we didn’t know” official Covid policy was so misguided. That’s just not true, of course, and is simply evidence of the thinking class’s recently-acquired allergy to truth. The part she left out of her petition for pandemic amnesty is: we were only following orders.