Governors’ and big tech’s partisan pandemic power grabs were anything but sensible, said David Marcus, a writer for The New York Post and author of “Charade: The True Story of the Coronavirus Crisis.”
“The American people were told to stop using their common sense for a year, right?” Marcus told Federalist Publisher and Host Ben Domenech on Fox News’s “The Ben Domenech podcast.” “‘This is science. Common sense has nothing to do with it.’”
One of the biggest polarizing factors of the pandemic, Marcus explained, occurred when state legislatures “punted the football” and gave governors and health officials unchecked power.
“They were just like ‘Hey, Governor, here’s all the power. Have it for as long as you want. We’re washing our hands of this.’ And one of the huge problems with that is that governors don’t do constituent services,” Marcus explained. “…For a year and what I as far as I’ve been able to find in a completely unprecedented fashion, state legislators just stopped functioning. The people lost their voice, utterly and completely.”
Marcus said this was a problem because “we can’t substitute the American people through their elected representatives making their own choices for a panel of experts appointed by governors or a president.”
“I do think that that central orthodoxy of conservatism, keep the government out of it, you know small government, limited government, is incredibly challenged by big tech and their power because we might be at a point where the only thing that can stand up to that are the levers of government power, and if that’s true, then conservatives need to rethink some things,” Marcus said.
While governors such as Democrat Andrew Cuomo wielded their massively expanded power poorly and hurt Americans in the process, Marcus said wasn’t until big tech companies began cracking down on certain people such as Dr. Scott Atlas that he saw how political COVID-19 had become.
“That was a huge wake-up call, not just in terms of that narrative of setting up heroes and villains but then big tech putting its thumb on the scales and the villain can’t even defend himself,” Marcus said.
It wasn’t long after that, that Marcus realized “you can’t negotiate anymore.”
“You have to go really big. So when I wrote the cover piece for The New York Post in May, the cover didn’t say ‘Let’s be sensible about these restrictions.’ It said ‘it needs to end now.’ I said ‘Open the whole city right now. The whole thing.’ Now, did I think there was a chance in h-ll that all city was gonna open? Of course not. But I had grown so sick and tired of playing the small ball even when I tried to make a sacrifice from my side. It was pointless and it didn’t matter,” Marcus said.
One “potential silver lining” of the pandemic, Marcus said, was that parents became more invested in their children’s education.
“I think the teachers unions learned a lesson about how far they can go and I think you see that. I actually think it’s very related to what we’re seeing in terms of critical race theory right now. This stuff about ‘open the schools, get the mask off my kid,’ kind of opened a floodgate of parents being like ‘Wait a minute, I can go to the school board meetings,’” Marcus said.
Source: The Federalist
