Covid Hysteria Was Not Like the Others
And the Left owned it
Prior to Covid there were constant minor hysterias on both the Left and Right, each a ying to the yang.
The anti-abortion extremists are exactly as irrational as the pro-abortion-up-until-9-months folks.
The anti-trans movement has gone bigger than is rationally justified, but it is itself a reaction to the clear trans hysteria movement.
Similar for anti-Woke to the Woke.
All minor. And fairrrrly symmetrical.
But Covid was a million times greater in magnitude. It was an altogether different animal.
Don’t confuse what happened during Covid with your run of the mill moral panics.
It engulfed the Earth, restructured societal functioning, billions lost jobs, millions lost their companies, human-induced excess deaths skyrocketed, the developing world has been set back by a decade or more, civil liberties were violated with righteous impunity, states proudly censored anyone critical, a rushed medication was coerced on billions of people, and if you refused you were fired, banished, prevented from travel and refused medical treatment.
The Left is not solely responsible for the March 2020 origins of the Covid totalitarianism.
But the Left took the Zero Covid narrative into its identity, and is now proudly agitating for authoritarianism on nearly all fronts.
Some of this is correct, but much is sloppy. You can do better. This part is particularly bad:
"The anti-abortion extremists are exactly as irrational as the pro-abortion-up-until-9-months folks."
On the abortion issue, and on most issues, it is extremists - on one side or the other - who are right. The moderates are the irrational ones. Consider the moderates who favored the three-fifths compromise. Or King Solomon, who offered the moderate path of giving half the baby to each claimant. Not rational, not "right". Expedient at best. The right answer is almost always one of the extremes. Those extremists (mainly Southerners, ironically) who argued that a slave was five-fifths of a person were the rational ones, the ones who were right.
There are rational and irrational people on both sides of the abortion issue. And the extremists on both sides are, on average, far more rational than the moderates.