“The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading,” reads a September 1 headline at the New York Times.

See what they did there? See what’s incorrect?

If not, consider these three snippets from the article beneath the headline:

“National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.”

“Then came the pandemic, which shuttered schools across the country almost overnight.”

“[E]xperts say it will take more than the typical school day to make up gaps created by the pandemic.”

The headline and the three snippets represent a brazen attempt at Orwellian “rectification” of history to erase key facts and reassign blame.

The pandemic itself — that is,  COVID-19 — has had almost no  direct effect on 9-year-olds.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, to date the total number of 9-year-old Americans who have died of COVID-19 in the 32 months since it broke out is 42. That’s about one of every 25,000 US COVID-19 deaths. The numbers for other preteen and adolescent age groups are similar.

We’ve known since early on that kids are unlikely to get COVID-19, even less likely to become severely ill from COVID-19, and have almost no chance of dying of COVID-19.

We’ve also had a pretty good grasp of COVID-19’s symptoms from the beginning. Fever. Dry cough. Fatigue. Respiratory distress. One thing that’s not a symptom of COVID-19? “Shuttering of schools.”

COVID-19 didn’t “shutter schools.” Humans — adult humans in positions of authority — did that.

After nearly three years, education is one of many institutions that haven’t recovered from  the damage done by dumb decisions American politicians and bureaucrats made early on and then kept making, all while hopping from foot to foot screeching “BUT SCIENCE!” at anyone who pointed out the costs and problems involved.

Instead of admitting that the decisions they made were, in most cases, massive unforced errors based on panic and political power grabs rather than on sound science or any previously existing conception of “public health,” the people who made those choices keep trying to shift blame.

Why? Presumably because they hope to avoid responsibility and accountability by memory-holing what actually happened and their role in it, and just blaming Every Bad Thing on “the pandemic.”

And the New York Times is helping them get away with it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On August 23, Democratic primary voters in Florida picked their champion for the November attempt to unseat incumbent Republican governor Ron DeSantis.

In fairness, those voters weren’t offered much of a choice. The two “had a realistic chance of winning” candidates were Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist.

Fried, a former lobbyist, spent her entire term as the state’s only statewide elected official (agriculture commissioner) issuing “oh no you didn’t” press releases every time DeSantis so much as yawned, and pulling stupid tricks like adding her photo to the inspection stickers on every Florida gas pump as publicly funded campaign ads (the legislature nixed that one in short order).

You’d  have to look pretty hard to find a candidate less likely to lead a successful anti-DeSantis revolution. Unless, of course, Charlie Crist happened to get interested. Which he did, decisively defeating Fried for the ballot line.

Crist  is the mirror-like spitting image of Ron DeSantis: They’re both swamp creatures, political careerists, tax parasites who’ve spent their entire adult lives either on, or trying to get on, government payrolls.

Crist has been a state senator, state education commissioner, state attorney general, governor, and US Representative. He’s been continuously in office, running for office, or preparing to run for office since 1986. His party affiliation record is sort of “reverse Donald Trump.” Over the last decade, he’s gone from Republican to “independent” to Democrat. Whose dog is he? Whomever’s will hunt with him in his latest crusade to get paid for running your life.

DeSantis’s resume is shorter but strikingly similar. He went from government lawyer — first in the US Navy, representing/advising the government’s Guantanamo Bay torturers, then as an assistant US attorney — to US Representative, to jumping on the Trump train and getting himself elected governor by a razor-thin margin of less than 1/2 of 1% in 2018. Since which time he’s split his work days between pouring culture war fertilizer on his presidential ambitions and trying to make sure that anyone who might vote against his re-election this November can’t vote at all.

Neither of these life-long grifters deserves another four years of welfare checks, but one of them will almost certainly win this November’s episode of Wheel of Voter Misfortune (spoiler: It will probably be DeSantis, who’s at least good at motivating his “base,” while Crist enthuses only … well, no one).

In 2016, Trump re-popularized the slogan “drain the swamp,” which has been around forever but which he probably cribbed from Pat Buchanan, who beat him in his first presidential campaign (the Reform Party’s 2000 nomination contest).

DeSantis and Crist ARE the swamp. They may not represent EVERYTHING  wrong with American politics, but between them they represent most of those things. They’re twin poster boys for term limits, with the preferred number being “zero.”

I won’t attempt to advise Florida voters on their third party and independent options, but they should know that a vote for Ron DeSantis is a vote for Charlie Crist, and a vote for Charlie Crist is a vote for Ron DeSantis.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On August 24, the Biden administration finally announced what pretty much everyone (including me) had been predicting for months:  A new round of “student loan forgiveness” and an extension to the COVID-19-justified “payment pause.”

Quick details of the current plan: More than 40 million borrowers will receive some relief. About 20 million will have their debt completely forgiven. Individuals who earn less than $125,000 per year (or couples earning up to $250,000) will have up to $10,000 taken off their tabs. Lower-income individuals who qualified for Pell Grants are eligible for double that amount.

While the details are new, the timing was never much in doubt, because helping out existing student borrowers is the effect, not the intent, of the plan. The intent is to motivate 40 million voters (and their parents, spouses, and children) to vote for Democrats less than three months from now in the midterm congressional elections.

Similarly, the intent behind Republican howling over the measure is to motivate everyone who feels ripped off because they didn’t borrow money for college, or paid that debt off without such assistance, but who will be taxed to cover the check for Biden’s generosity, to vote Republican.

My guess is that the Democrats have the upper hand here: The beneficiaries are going to be very happy;  taxpayers in general are barely going to notice in the long term, and probably not get nearly as up in arms as the GOP hopes they will in the short term.

The total amount involved (in this round, anyway) comes to “only” $329.1 billion over ten years according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Yes, that sounds like a lot of money, and it is.

On the other hand, it’s less than half (again, spread over ten years) as much as each of us gets ripped off for every year, year in and year out, for a supposed “national defense” that consists largely of writing welfare checks to Raytheon, Boeing, and friends, and workfare checks to kids who go into uniform instead off to college.

Say what you will about some of the more seemingly useless courses of study: At least your average “gender studies” student probably isn’t torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay or murdering eight-year-old American girls in Yemen. So there’s that, anyway.

As someone whose tiny student debt was paid off long ago (I dropped out midway through my first semester of college and have paid cash for the credit hours I’ve slowly accrued since), the idea neither enthuses nor upsets me.

On the other hand, this “forgiveness” does nothing to address the underlying problems with the high costs of higher education.  It’s just a Democratic Party vote-buying scheme that Republicans are hoping to use as a BOGO for their own base.

If our political class actually wanted to address the real problems, they’d get government out of the student lending business, and allow student debt to be discharged in bankruptcy on the same terms as other debt.

Unfortunately, solving problems is the opposite of what politics is about.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY