“The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.”
Proverbs 28:1 ESV
In a recent article in The Atlantic, professor Katie Martin calls for a “pandemic amnesty.” Her basic point is that the crazed policies of lockdowns, school closures, forced masking and vaccinations should all be forgiven. Tyranny was, in her telling, a mere trifle…an overreaction. She’s like Bill in Tarantino’s Kill Bill telling Kiddo, “I guess I overreacted…” and this in reference to his murderous rampage over her having left him for another man.
She says:
“In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!
”These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.”
But the thing is that we did know. Right from the start there were voices, rational and faithful ones, that said that closures, social distancing and masks were all a flimflam. We wrote much about it here. It would have been one thing if it was merely harmless, albeit weird, superstitions playing out among hypochondriacs. Watching a MLB pitcher skip over the baseline because he’s superstitious is one thing; being forced to wear a mask and not be able to earn a living is another.
We did know. The problem was that the wicked were running when no one was chasing because sin makes one terribly afraid. It eviscerates wisdom and common sense. And it’s not like they were simply mistaken. On the contrary, they wanted to be mistaken because they were drunk on the power of the lockdowns. You see, COVID and tyrannical lockdowns exposed unbelief for what it is. It’s not a question of whether we’ll worship, but whom and/or what. The modern American left worships the government and COVID proved it. When they think of food, shelter, education, and healthcare, to whom do they appeal? The state. Christianity has “values” they think, but the reality of life is the state. Deep inside, their fundamental conviction is that the state is ultimate, not God. The COVID tyranny was a result of this unspoken presupposition at the root of our American-style secular humanism.
“I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.”
She teaches. At a major university. She lived in a brazen and irrational panic that defied common sense and yet she’s a professor. Let that sink in. And naturally, she’s “teaching” a class that reflects on her lack of knowledge. The irrationality of that boggles the mind. To be so daft as to write that sentence ought to get one kicked out of a place of learning. Oh, well. Wonderful. Just wonderful. Our young are paying for this. Let that sink in too.
“Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.”
The risk to children wasn’t “relatively low”. It was virtually non-existent and yet the cost of the school shutdowns has been staggering and will continue to alarm us as the generation matures. Again, those that counseled to keep schools open were told they wanted children to die. Hardly a reasonable debate was had and dissent was ruthlessly silenced.
“Another example: 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 result of uncertainty.”
Ah, what a whopper. Let’s review, shall we?
We were told that getting the jab would stop us from getting COVID. Wrong.
It would stop us from giving COVID to others. Wrong again.
Oh, and here’s the doozy, even if you had COVID already you needed to get jabbed anyway. Those of us who wondered how it was that natural immunity, kind of the bedrock of immunology and all that, was for the first time in history not a thing, were called anti-science and “threats to society.” We were forced from our jobs if we didn’t want to take an experimental and totally new kind of “vaccine” that didn’t work as advertised. Let’s not forget this important point. They were tyrants and now the premise of their tyranny has been proven as a sham. That’s what we’re talking about, folks.
“The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.”
I don’t want to gloat. I want to give praise to God for the wisdom He provided during such a hysteria. I want the world to know that because of His word I was undaunted. In faith, Christians weren’t quivering in fear and calling everyone who disagreed with tyranny the most hateful things and demanding that they lose their right to speak and earn a living. Yes! I want to gloat in the Lord. I want Ms. Martin to hear me signing:
“Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.”
Psalm 119:98–99 ESV
And my favorite:
“These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainly, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.”
Ah…it absolutely is a moral failing to be wrong about, you know, moral principles! For crying out loud, the good professor makes it sound as though the whole disagreement was a harmless little affair, nothing more than a dispute over what was the best way to make a recipe or something. In reality, she and her tyrannical allies advocated for the evisceration of free speech and property rights. Those aren’t small things. They’re the whole thing. And the reason they did this was because they are, in fact, tyrants. I know, I know. This is a hard thing to hear. But it must be said because we need to understand the type of thing – the category – we’re dealing with.
To say that the wicked flee when no one pursues is to say, in this context, that the wicked are fundamentally irrational. The “wicked” are those who reject God, refuse to thank and worship Him. This is wicked because as Scripture clearly states, what can be known about God is plain to all through the things that have been made. The heavens don’t suggest Him, they declare Him. Despite what we like to tell ourselves, unbelief is “without excuse.” It’s profoundly irrational to believe, as John MacArthur says, “nothing times nobody equals everything.” The wicked flee is why highly “educated” fools convinced themselves that an airborne virus wouldn’t be transmitted while we were eating in a restaurant but could be if we didn’t have a cloth mask on while walking from the door to the table. Yes, and it’s precisely how even doctors and nurses (oh, the insanity!) ignored something as fundamental as natural immunity while being okay with people losing their jobs for not wanting an experimental “vaccine” that never did what it was supposed to do.
This isn’t about “racking up points.” No. It’s much better and bigger than that. We’re spiking the football! We’re doing a victory dance in the end zone because this is about God’s glory!! Virtually the only people who had the courage to stand up for common sense and freedom during the lockdown tyranny were, you guessed it, Christians. And this was because Christians understood that God never commands us to solve a problem with a sin. He blesses us with freedom of speech and property rights and these are fundamental to social/political life. Christians understood this. And Christians weren’t given over to the idolatry of science and state either, so they saw the limits that Ms. Martin speaks of in her article. This is how we were right and she was wrong.
And, yeah, it’s not just okay to spike the ball in the Lord’s name, it’s what we should do. Absolutely. The law of the Lord is perfect, making wise the simple! For this reason alone – to give Him glory and show others how we stood strong through the greatest misadventure, and wave of propaganda, fear, and tyranny in modern history while others caved. We rejoice that the Word of the Lord and its life-giving principles are altogether true. And we call on Ms. Martin and others like her to turn to the true and living God and be saved.
Oh, and no, we shouldn’t let her off the hook either. This nonsense that we should forgive people who haven’t repented in the first place is sissified false-Christianity. We call on her to repent for her clear sins of slander and tyranny. She and her allies committed great, grave, and comprehensive sins against one and all. She’s not off the hook. Not even close. We call on her to see how her false religion of secular humanism led her to those mistakes. We call on her to have the courage to face the real reason for her mistakes and repent of them.
“Those who forsake the law praise the wicked, but those who keep the law strive against them.”
Proverbs 28:4 ESV
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