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Isabelle Williams's avatar

As an independent who did not vote for Trump in 2016 but did in 2024, I find this so out of touch. For me the big authoritarian shock came during covid. I get it that early on, no one knew what was going on. But very quickly high level epidemiologists like Bhattacharya and Ionnides ( most cited researcher in his field) were saying: Don't lockdown. This disease is highly dangerous only for the very old... Instead we had TWO YEARS of school closures in dem states, while Europe had like 3 months! We had vaccine mandates - even after it was crystal clear that the vaccine did NOT prevent transmission.

What can be more authoritarian that depriving people of social contact, church, school? What can be more authoritarian than mandating a brand new, emergency use authorization, lipid nanoparticle mRNA shot for young people to stay in college, for pregnant women to keep their jobs?

NY State health department established rules to create quarantine camps for any infectious disease ( with no threshold for infection fatality rate) . Never actually built and used, but they could be. This regulation was challenged in court but they appealed and won.

The Biden admin pressured Meta and other platforms( who had big monopoly cases with the DOJ) to censor scientists like Bhattacharya and others, to de platform etc. Amazon has huge contracts with DOD for cloud services, Senators like Warren told them they should remove books that were questioning covid or the covid vax!

So I just do not get it, the whining about authoritarianism. I dont like what Trump is doing deporting protestors. But if you refuse to address the massive covid authoritarianism,- you will never win back people like me.

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Craig Knoche's avatar

I don't disagree about the direction, but wonder where you were during the Obama and Biden administrations when the authoritarian court and congress-defying precedents were being set.

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