THREAD

Tomorrow will be 3 weeks since Texas lifted it’s mask mandate. Coronavirus cases have been steadily declining since, w/ yesterday the 18th day in a row of decreases.

But you may remember the left & the media promised the reverse would happen. And I’ve got receipts.

The only place to start this thread is with @JoeBiden, whom you may remember referred to Texas’s opening up as “Neanderthal thinking.”

Perhaps the White House would like to follow up about why?

Other governors also took shots. Here’s @GavinNewsom, whose decision to keep his state shut down cost the state 52,000 jobs.

Perhaps the most ridiculously performative politician was (once again) @BetoORourke, who called lifting the mask mandate a “death warrant” on every outlet who would have him on (including @CNN and @MSNBC)

We even had former legislators from other states chime in.

Unlike Texas, @alfranken’s home state of Minnesota has seen its total number of cases increase since early March - having doubled since Abbott’s announcement. Per 100k rates there are higher than TX now.

We had other legislators who still have jobs get involved in the histrionics, too. Here’s @JulianCastro.

I want to pause to drive the point home. Yesterday Texas reported 4007 new cases. Here are a couple states w/ more than double that total reported:

Michigan - 9297 (population 1/3 of Texas, still shut down)
New York - 8972

The 7-day average is higher in New Jersey than TX, too.

One of the things we’ve seen throughout the pandemic is news outlets using experts to tell the story they’re more interested in believing.

That these experts are so often wrong seems not to have dissuaded @NBCNews and @LesterHoltNBC from going back to the well.

But probably the worst offender on this is @CNN.

By focusing only on the voices who are the most frightened and pessimistic, you create the impression that there’s only one right way to think and feel about these things.

Look at that first headline! This is straight news!

And it wasn’t just their main channel that got involved - particular reporters and shows were pushing the same thing. Here we’ve got @biannagolodryga and @OutFrontCNN.

And it of course wouldn’t be a thread unless @ChrisCillizza found his way onto it.

Again, the power of narrative here can’t be overstated. When outlets only talk to people who are scared, it communicates that every reasonable person is scared (which is commentary) even as the reporting reads as straight news.

Here’s two more examples from @nytimes.

And there are plenty more, I just don’t have the space. But as usual @MSNBC was a particularly egregious example of the broader phenomena.

As an aside, when you look at mainstream media coverage about how Texas’s decision was going to be a disaster, for some reason nearly all the stories are from the first week of March, and there haven’t been really any since mid-March, before the predictions came due.

Wonder why?

Anyway, it won’t surprise you that we also had lots and lots of blue checks in hysterics about this plan. @MMFlint was perhaps the most well-known for his pretty appalling take.

But there were a lot of other people whose contention basically boiled down to “Abbot is killing people!” which, if that were the plan, hasn’t played out. Here’s @JohnWDean, who is quickly becoming a household name on these threads.

You had to know from @mcmurphy_pat’s artwork that there was no way @JRubinBlogger wasn’t going to find her way onto this list.

And where left-wing conspiracy theories about evil Republicans go, @JoyAnnReid is always close behind. This was no exception.

As ever, the Twitter doctors got involved in this one. You would think that a collection of people who had been so consistently wrong on matters of consequence would be chastened. @DrEricDing and @DrJoeHanson certainly aren’t.

@paulkrugman also predicted the internet wouldn’t be as important as the fax machine, so maybe at this rate he should give up predicting the future.

I’m just a man, staring at a phone screen, begging Comedy Central to find someone funny for any of their shows. @TheDailyShow.

I don’t have the time, space or patience to include everyone, but there were tons of people lamenting this. Many of them are just bad actors but adding them for reference:
@meenaharris
@KeithOlbermann (go figure)
@GeorgeTakei
@mmpadellan (I hope he at least got paid)

I know it’s naive, but at some point I really would’ve hoped that the people who have been wrong at every turn during all this would stop shouting when anyone dares do something other than what His Highness Dr Fauci recommends.

Apparently not.

And a big part of this is that, for lots of people who are comfortable, they simply don’t care. The lockdown hasn’t been that bad for them and they can’t imagine that it’s causing suffering for others. I wrote about that back in December: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/opinion/covid-lockdown-isolation.amp.html

Maybe we’ll get to a better place on this stuff one day soon. But so long as we’ve got a bunch of self-appointed and self-important experts suggesting an approach is dead on arrival - and refusing to correct the record when it isn’t - color me skeptical.

It should go without saying but it should be obvious to people why trust in the media and in experts have both taken a nose dive. You can only be unapologetically wrong so many times before people simply stop believing you.

This one’s gained some traction so usual disclaimer: nothing to sell/subscribe to, but if you’ve got disposable income, food banks need your help.

If you’re in DC like me, Capital Area Food Bank does great work. https://www.capitalareafoodbank.org