Nobody is bagging him because the smart-set have largely memory-holed their in hindsight very bad takes on the coronavirus risk. The minute Jacinda announced a lockdown, they became - and in their minds always were - lockdown hawks. https://twitter.com/benthomasnz/status/1246661645901762560

Honestly the doublethink on display on March was absolutely amazing. Because the smart thing to do was lambast Trump for being blasé, they would snark about that while also snarking at the people raising the same alarm here about the NZ government. Often in sequential tweets.

Then there’s the handshake thing. Remember all the tweets about how Boris Johnson deserves coronavirus because In February he said he was still shaking hands. Then it turned out that Jacinda Ardern said she was still shaking hands in *March* which is somehow “that’s different”.

Never before has it been clearer to me how lethal the effect of Twitter is on a certain type of mediocre mind.

Anyway, if you really, really want to see our intellectual yet idiot class in action, track down some of the “bro it’s just the flu” tweets from Nigel Latta then scroll through the list of favs and look at all the familiar names. It is depressing AF.