THE KNOW-IT-ALLS WHO DIDN’T

For 27 years, I took a reverse-route commuter train to work. One chilly day, as I waited on New Brunswick’s uncrowded, southwest-bound New Brunswick platform, two stories above street level, a robust man in his late fifties stood impassively, five yards away, alongside a woman who appeared to be his wife. He was wearing a winter jacket and a crimson baseball cap bearing the University of Alabama’s logo.

As one of my daughters was an Alabama undergraduate, I approached the man and said, “Roll Tide.” (This is a signifying salutation among those connected to that institution). At first, he was indifferent. Then I pulled out of my briefcase an envelope containing a letter I had written to my daughter the night before and was ready to drop in the mailbox at the end of the line in Trenton, 28 minutes away.

Showing the man the envelope’s address, I said, “No, really. Roll Tide! My daughter is going to school in Tuscaloosa.”

He smiled in response. I asked him why he was wearing the hat. He explained that he had retired from his office job and had begun driving new buses from an assembly plant near his Alabama home to various US cities where these vehicles would be deployed. He and his wife had just dropped off a bus in Central Jersey and were taking the train to the Trenton station and, after changing trains there, to the Philadelphia Airport, from which they’d fly home, rest for a few days and drive another bus to another destination.

When our train arrived, we three boarded. NJ Transit trains have some seats that face each other so that people can chat with family or friends. The man, who identified himself as Jim, sat facing me in his light blue seat.

Staking out some quiet time, Jim’s wife took the seat across the aisle, eight feet away. She placidly looked out the window at the unremarkable Central New Jersey scenery as the train cruised at 90 mph on a straight, station-free stretch of the Northeast Corridor line.

I asked Jim some questions about his unusual new gig. He told me he and his wife had to cover 500 miles each day and that he did all the driving. He admitted that, while they enjoyed each other’s company, his wife spent much of the bus time looking out the window because, after all their years together, there was only so much left to discuss.

With me as a new travel companion, Jim talked a blue streak. He spoke about his family, his hometown, Alabama football, his favorite Bama ribs places, et al. I was content to listen. As they say, you don’t learn much by speaking. And I knew that morning’s trip wasn’t that long.

Jim continued yapping, unbroken, all the way to Princeton Junction. And beyond. About twenty minutes after our trip started, his iPhone rang. He raised his hand to punctuate his speech and said to me, “Hold on.”

Then he glanced at his phone’s screen and chuckled.

I asked, “What’s so funny?”

He turned the phone toward me, smirked and said, “It’s from my wife.”

The screen read, simply, “Stop doin’ all the talkin.’”

—

Last week, a friend mocked and forwarded to me an op-ed from the New York Times entitled, without a hint of irony, “Is it Time to Stop Snubbing your Right-Wing Family?”

The first-person, anecdotal piece seems like self-parody. But neither the writer, David Litt, nor Times readers seem sufficiently self-aware to pull off or appreciate this comedic form.

The author begins:

Not too long ago, I felt a civic duty to be rude to my wife’s younger brother. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician’s license.

Then the pandemic hit, and our preferences began to feel like more than differences in taste. We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war. The deepest divide was vaccination. I wasn’t shocked when my brother-in-law didn’t get the Covid shot. But I was baffled. Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation. It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I’d imagined we shared.

Had he been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely. As it was, on the rare and always outdoor occasions when we saw each other, I spoke in disapproving snippets.

My frostiness wasn’t personal. It was strategic. Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?

I wasn’t the only one thinking this. A 2021 essay for USA Today declared, “It’s time to start shunning the ‘vaccine hesitant.’” An L.A. Times piece went further, arguing that to create “teachable moments,” it may be necessary to mock some anti-vaxxers’ deaths.

—

I’d laugh at Litt and his ilk if they weren’t so pathetic and annoying.

And numerous. In American metro areas, critical thinkers, whom he dismisses as “right-wingers,” are outnumbered by self-appointed know-it-alls with degrees from name-brand colleges or state universities. Often, what these self-imagined elites are told at school or by their favored media outlets is demonstrably false. They’re habitually long on dogma and demagoguery and short on facts.

There are many examples. As does Litt, I’ll focus on America’s Covid response.

In addition to many other informational deficits, the closed-minded individuals who embraced the non-pharmaceutical interventions (“NPIs”), i.e., lockdowns, school closures, masks and tests knew nothing about the PCR-testing methodology and how it routinely produced false positives. Nor did they know that hospitals were lavishly financially rewarded for attributing deaths to Covid and thus, miscategorized those who died of old age or poor baseline health or who were ventilated or sedated to death as having been killed by Covid.

Additionally, the Coronamanic demanded that schools close even though kids were at zero risk. They insisted that all wear masks, even though these didn’t block viruses. They applauded and adopted “test-and-trace” despite the clear differences between its utility during sexually-transmitted disease epidemics, versus respiratory virus outbreaks. They had no inkling that the Department of Defense and Biosecurity edicts and operatives, not Public Health officials and Public Health principles, drove the historically unprecedented and counter-scientific Covid overreaction. They didn’t consider that spending trillions on Covid relief would cause record inflation that has permanently impoverished tens of millions of Americans. The NPI and shot supporters held many stocks and made massive passive income while the working class, with whom they imagine solidarity, fell further behind.

Given their closed-mindedness and intellectual laziness, there was much more that those who bought the Scamdemic narrative didn’t—and still don’t—know. Arrogant ignorance is bliss, at least to the ignorant and arrogant.

They didn’t know because, like Jim, they did all of the talking and none of the listening. Except that the Covophobic weren’t nearly as amiable as Jim was.

—

Litt absurdly asserts that his brother-in-law, a healthy twenty-something, had, by refusing the Covid shots, imperiled himself and breached some social contract. But the facts don’t support this claim.

Firstly, the virus presented no risk to his young BIL.

Secondly, as an attorney, I drafted and negotiated countless contracts. The process is protracted and painstaking. By definition, no contract exists unless all parties agree to all of its terms. They teach this early in law school, though everyone should intuitively understand this concept. If Litt had been willing to speak with, instead of giving the silent treatment to, unvaxxed people like me, we non-jabbers could have pointed out that we never agreed to inject an experimental substance to prevent a cold. Given the lack of discussion, much less agreement, regarding the shots, the social contract that Litt posits never existed.

Beyond this legal dimension, Litt’s insistence that all must inject a formulation with no long-term safety record to ward off an unscary virus, and his passive-aggressive behavior to enforce this purported obligation, reveal the Scamdemic and “progressivism” in a nutshell. Just because Littites irrationally feared a virus and supported the oppressive and illogical NPIs and unsafe and ineffective shots didn’t mean that everyone else had to. “Progressives” delusionally see themselves as Ubermenschen: arbiters of social policy, destined to rule others by virtue of their college degrees.

Those who stridently supported the NPIs and shots were never willing to discuss facts, science and logic with others who, unbeknownst to the Coronamanics, knew more than these Littites did. The Covophobic chose fear, NPIs and jabs because they and their sociopolitical tribe had internalized government and media propaganda and/or benefitted economically, politically and logistically from the disruption. They lacked the scientific knowledge and/or logical skills to perceive the obvious flaws in the NPI and shot narratives or to sensibly answer questions about these. Or they knew they were expediently lying.

The Littites’ imaginary vaxx contract rested on the false premises that SARS-CoV-2 was extremely dangerous and that the shots would “stop its spread.” When, within weeks, millions of the vaxxed “got The Virus,” the jabbers backpedaled to “We never said the shots would stop the spread. But they kept me out of the hospital!”

These, and many other Coronamaniacs’ predicates and beliefs, were always untenable and soon disproven. Throughout, the Covophobes’ peer-pressured allegiance to the NPIs and shots was emotional, ideological, opportunistic and imitative, not rational or scientific.

The Covid shot supporters also don’t know that excess deaths in the highly-Covid-vaccinated nations spiked during the injection crusade and have remained elevated. The shots are shortening and worsening, not lengthening and improving, lives.

The NPI and vaxx backers would have known these, and other, useful facts and concepts, if they’d read more about biology and how to promote human health. They might also have broadened their understanding by considering viral outcomes among people they knew and applying logic, instead of demanding others to obey the NPIs and accepting, as gospel, the plainly flawed Covid narrative presented by the Times, Yahoo News, CNN, NPR and PBS.

Easier than all of the foregoing, instead of avoiding “right-wingers,” the self-perceived elites could have engaged, without bias, in dialogue with challengers of the dubious Covid orthodoxy. Instead, they pigeon-holed all of the NPI and shot opponents as clueless, deplorable political foes, unworthy and incapable of discussion.

—

Progressives/Littites see the world through a prism of stereotypes and demographic identities. Litt suggests that blue-collar workers and Joe Rogan listeners are, ipso facto, misinformed. I’ve listened to Rogan interviews of MDs Mary Talley Bowden and Suzanne Humphries as well as the Meanses, Alex Berenson, RFK and Aaron Rodgers. These guests have each calmly spoken sense for three-plus hours, exposing the obvious lies that drove the Scamdemic. Challenging questions and intelligent dissent threaten Littites. They wouldn’t even consider an alternative view.

I’ll reciprocate Litt’s stereotypes by invoking a few, truer ones of my own. Most NPI and shot supporters have never had a physically challenging job. Few know many working-class people, especially those of other races. Though the Littites could never frame a house or install a furnace, they consider physical laborers intellectually inferior, as Litt does when he implicitly disparages his BIL’s electrical career.

Litt and his cohort also delusionally imagine that working-class people value and seek college graduates’ approval and feel sad when laptoppers snub them. Yet, no remotely insightful person would—even briefly—think, as did Litt, that grunting at his brother-in-law would cause his BIL to feel ashamed and inject mRNA.

Living within their self-important, entitled bubble, the Littites have, throughout their lives, been rewarded academically and socially for parroting orthodoxy and insisting that others yield to their mob. It’s their right to internalize their indoctrinators’ lies and behave like sheep. But they shouldn’t expect everyone to be so gullible that they would stay home, wear masks and take tests and experimental shots to prevent a brief illness, especially when many prior attempts to immunize against ever-changing coronaviruses had all failed.

—

Blinded by ego, Littites won’t allow themselves to see that they were thoroughly wrong about the entire viral response and that this overreaction killed or permanently injured hundreds of millions in the US and abroad. They don’t even think about apologizing for supporting the NPIs and shots and the snarly, peremptory manner in which they expressed their stances.

To the contrary, Litt sees himself as magnanimous because he’s resumed talking to his BIL, whom he had senselessly hated, shunned and attempted to socially bully during a period of widespread viral panic. Notably, his BIL initiated this rapprochement by generously teaching Litt how to surf. Needing this favor, the utilitarian Litt opened his mind just slightly enough to derive personal benefit, while holding fast to his hyper-inflated self-image. It’s not clear what those who backed the NPIs and shots can teach those of us who didn’t.

In order to shift focus away from their benighted blunders, Litt and other Covophobes prefer to discuss such superficial, diversionary fodder as sports, Netflix shows, ethnic eats, Taylor Swift songs and the weather, the latter with predictable, renewed summertime focus on climate change. By doing so, they also pretend that the Covid response caused none of the persisting social and economic damage.

Litt’s exhortation to let bygones be bygones is delusional, narcissistic and sociopathic. Those who opposed the NPIs and shots should reject Litt’s vacuous, Trump-channeling suggestion that there were good people on both sides of the Covid response issue.

During the Scamdemic, the dissident minority were well-informed, calm and rational. They weighed the costs of the NPIs, shots and massive giveaways against the plainly slight, age-stratified risks to a tiny fraction of the population. They decided and told others that all of these were profoundly counterproductive. But news and social media sites censored such dissent.

The opposing majority of closed-minded, mathematically and scientifically illiterate, opportunistic Covid demagogues bought the government and media hype and zealously endorsed a zero-tolerance Covid policy, supporting lockdowns and school closures and stealing life-affirming and life-shaping experiences from kids and other healthy people. They also facilitated an unprecedented wealth shift to the already wealthy. The NPI and shot backers vilified and endorsed taking jobs and medical treatment away from, and naively wished death upon, those who rationally refused shots that have already injured and hastened the deaths of millions world-wide.

From Day 1, I and some others were ready, willing and able to discuss the clearly inappropriate, downright suspicious response. But the Coronamanic only wanted to dictate terms to others, whom they incorrectly looked down upon. As the Coronamanic were comprehensively, resolutely wrong throughout the Scamdemic, they deserve to permanently lose credibility.

The world is much worse off following the Littites’ unprecedented, extreme, opportunistic overreaction to a respiratory virus. Given the way that the Scamdemic went down and Coronamaniacs’ unwillingness to own their egregious conduct, neither I nor other NPI and shot critics will let bygones be bygones. The Covophobic “progressives” will miss us far more than we’ll miss them.