They Do Not Know What They Do

Dr. Emily Oster et al.

This morning, I did something I’d been dreading for over a week: I read Emily Oster’s “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” which appeared in The Atlantic on October 31. Needless to say, I was outraged before I read the first word, but even after a week of reading reactions and scattered quotes from the article, I was blown away by the level of self-serving, dishonest, whiny and wormy bullshit that dripped from every word in her piece. I literally felt unclean after reading it.

In case you haven’t had the displeasure of reading the piece for yourself, let me quote her main thesis, which she kindly presents in the second paragraph of the piece: “We didn’t know.”

She develops this thesis over the next several paragraphs of her mercifully short piece. She starts by observing: “There is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information.”

Keep in mind that Dr. Oster has a PhD from Harvard and is a self-described expert on parenting. She’s even written a book titled: The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years. And yet this PhD-level expert on parenting and schooling has the gall to declare that we had “only glimmers” of information on the importance of in-person schooling and socialization to child development!

She goes on to write that:

“When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the resault of uncertainty.”

The necessary coda – “it was the result of uncertainty” – is there, but what’s astonishing is what’s not there: There’s no discussion of vaccine injuries, rising excess mortality in countries that used the mRNA vaccines, and negative efficacy of those vaccines after a few short months. Ms. Oster forgets all this and simply pretends that the whole question of vaccines revolved around which was better, Pfizer/Moderna or J & J.  

Are we to believe that Dr. Oster, a meticulously educated professor who clearly consumes vast amounts of news and information – to the point of becoming a public intellectual and left-wing media personality – was unaware of other questions around these vaccines?

More importantly, are we to believe that Dr. Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University, was unaware that shutting down our economies and printing trillions of dollars would cause catastrophic levels of inflation and economic destruction?

For the sake of completeness, let’s list the main things that Dr. Oster didn’t know:

·      She didn’t know that if you develop a vaccine in the spring of 2020 and release it six months later in the fall of 2020, you cannot possibly have any idea if it causes cancer, auto-immune disease or fertility problems, not to mention whether it harms unborn children.

·      She didn’t know that children must meet other children to thrive.

·      She didn’t know that children, especially those of working-class people, do MUCH better with in-person education.

·      She didn’t know that shutting down the economy and printing trillions of dollars would destroy the economy and millions of lives and dreams along with it.

·      She didn’t know that it’s morally abhorrent and incredibly dangerous to scapegoat and exclude one segment of society. 

That’s what she didn’t know. The thing is: I believe her when she says she didn’t know. That’s not to say she couldn’t have known these things if she stopped to think for a while, or if she had taken the time to research outside her usual media sources. But, in terms of what was actually in Dr. Oster’s mind, it’s probably fair to say she didn’t know these things. Do not forget: The capacity of the mind to suppress inconvenient truths is truly remarkable.

What’s much more important to consider is what Dr. Oster did know: Dr. Oster knew, with near-perfect certainty, exactly what the prevailing elite narrative was and how best to repeat it to ensure her continued safety and success in the world dominated by those elites.

Dr. Oster may not be a genius. She may not even be terribly intelligent, but she has a superpower that she has honed since her preschool days: the ability to determine what Authority wants of her and how best to deliver it to them. In that regard, she is truly next level. She can walk into a classroom, a department meeting, or an editorial conference and determine with unerring accuracy exactly what she has to do or say to earn the approval of the most powerful person there.

And there are millions of others like her. Just about every graduate of an elite American university is an Emily Oster because that is what our education system, particularly our elite education system, selects for: the ability of the student to conform to the existing narrative. You don’t get accepted and you don’t get promoted if you don’t have this skill. It works both positively and negatively: Conscientious and agreeable “good girls” like Dr. Oster get all the A’s, recommendations and promotions. And those who dare to dissent from the narrative get cancelled.

The process starts in school, but it enters hyperdrive in the real world, where Big Tech fact checkers – who are all various iterations of Emily Oster, and usually graduates of the same schools – and Big Tech algorithm writers – again, all Emily Osters – assiduously promote voices and information favorable to Power and eliminate anything or anyone that threatens Power.

The students in this system don’t learn to think. Rather, they learn to read the narrative. Elite universities are the farm teams where Emily Osters hone their skills by reading the narrative contained in minds of poverty-stricken postmodernist professors, and the best of the best graduate to the big leagues, where they apply those skills to reading the narrative of the billionaires who own Big Tech and Big Pharma.

In the modern world, there is no truth and there’s only one “good”: that which benefits Big Capital.

What this means is that we are governed by monsters. And I really do mean monsters. Emily Oster and all those like her who inhabit our elite universities, our regulatory agencies, the ruling political party, and Big Tech are monsters. They are well-educated, well-dressed, and well-mannered monsters, who can convince themselves of their own virtue while instituting policies that cause immeasurable harm and death to the least powerful members of their societies. And their polished exterior only makes them more monstrous.

Dr. Emily Oster is the perfect embodiment of the modern monster who forms the scribe class of the techno-feudal system that we call Technocracy.

If there is a truth for these people, it’s only this:

When the man wearing the white coat says to increase the voltage, you increase the voltage.

And we are all wired now.