I get that “but Donald Trump was president in 2020!” is a popular retort here, but it’s actually both silly and dangerous to blame Donald Trump for the lockdowns in 2020 - for a simple reason: there were no lockdowns in 2020 by blaming Trump for “lockdowns” you’re co-signing their fake grievances
what happened in 2020 was that the mechanisms of boring and relatively benevolent government - the CDC, HHS, etc etc etc - were still in place, and mostly worked well. that’s what happened in 2020
See this is also a form of invention. They were not at all working well, they were subjected to constant political interference. Don’t create a history that never existed for stuff that’s barely five years old.
This thread talks about the closure of institutions in 2020. When you retort out that Donald Trump was President in 2020, you’re suggesting that Trump somehow manipulated the CDC into closing millions of institutions across the United States. I’m just saying: that’s not true. It didn’t happen.
“In 2020, Evil Joe Biden closed all our churches but left the bars open! In 2020, Evil Joe Biden put federal troops outside of the homes of Christians and forced them to stay inside at gunpoint!” I’m just saying: The answer to this kind of silliness is not to say “no, Trump was President then.”
For example: this is from the post. But it didn’t happen. Hawaii didn’t shut down churches and blithely leave “bars” open; in fact, the governor of Hawaii, David Ige, very publicly worked to ask ALL public indoor spaces to close. Blaming this on Trump when it didn’t even actually happen is silly.
Now: I am 100% in agreement when you say that CDC, HHS, etc, were being manipulated and meddled with by President Trump in 2020. This is unfortunately not unknown in US gov’t, tho Trump was then worse than most. But he hadn’t captured them yet, and CDC’s guidance, for example, was largely good then.
I see, you’re taking the complaint seriously rather than as fundamentally flawed. I see a similar issue with Senator Schatz’s argument. A sharp retort that their complaint is simply false (Biden was not President) short circuits editing and delegitimizes the category of claim. It’s a harsher retort.
Okay- I can agree that there’s something to be said for a rhetorically immediate shutdown of a bad argument. My worry is that it leaves intact the real targets of MAGA grievance propaganda. From here they just blame (a) Dem governors and (b) the “deep state” CDC for shutting down all our churches…
… and I’m worried that Dems like Schatz are credulously agreeing and signing on to the attempted dismantling. But you’re probably right that sharply pointing out that they’re just factually wrong IS more immediately useful.
I think we’re largely on the same page here, tbh
I agree, and “silly and dangerous” was clearly overstating the case; sorry.
But also, you do you, I don’t think we have to be in lockstep. I am primarily concerned with a Democratic Senator amplifying misinformation than I am arguing any particulars about it.
You can pick a different word for it if you like, but millions and millions of us lived through society partially shutting down, with a lot of things temporarily closing, due to concerns about a new deadly virus. It happened. We were there.
Which of those institutions did Donald Trump order shut? Or Biden after him? When I say there were no lockdowns, I don’t mean nothing closed. I mean that government action didn’t close things. Economic action did. And Americans still constantly lie to themselves that that isn’t the case.
(One thing people consistently forget is that the economy started to dive in late Feb 2020. Almost none of us even knew what COVID was then. We blame government for a LOT of silly things, and this is one; the economic downturn in 2020 was caused by a loss of consumer confidence - not “lockdowns.”)