music

Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast today is Tuesday December 1st 2020 I am John Podhoritz the editor of commentary if you are a subscriber to our print magazine it is winging its way to your mailbox anytime this week beautiful issue and that we're very proud of it every one of my colleagues has well actually yes every

one of my colleagues has a has a contribution to this issue beginning with associate editor no Rothman high Noah on the on the aftermath of the election senior writer Christine Rosen high Christine

on the aftermath of the election and executive editor Abe Greenwald high Abe hudgeon not on the aftermath of the election but rather a review of Rodgers live not by lies so Noah Rothman we got an email today from a skeptical and angry listener irritated that we were downplaying the severity of the election

of the coronavirus surge pointing out that the hospitalizations across the United States are at their highest level ever at about 97000 and yesterday we were saying that the stats looked better than people were giving them credit for being and that we were still the frame in which the media were pushing us or panic

narrative you wanted to talk today about a piece in axios relating to how we are being told we should we should discuss or talk about the pandemic

yeah it's the only thing I can think about this morning so if I open my eyes that was the first thing I read and spend with me ever since you know just to pivot briefly off your news hook there are email you know go to the as I talked about yesterday just go to the homepage of the Atlantic and you can get your daily dose of searing pessimism

the latest today is from Derek Thompson who has committed himself to the pandemic beat who notes that yeah the statistics are going to look better they are looking a little bit better but guess what it's a lucery it's all a lie because it's going to get so much terrible after Thanksgiving

we don't know but you're pretty sure it's going to get so much more terrible after Thanksgiving and even if it doesn't it's going to get so much terrible before Christmas and after Christmas so it's just going to be terrible so if you want your daily dose of terrible it's really not hard to find it I don't know why you got a lean on us to reinforce your terrible but you know the big problem here is that a lot of us all of us on this podcast are conservatives and according to you know the if elite sympathies

and you know just a general consensus among opinion makers and particularly in the press Republicans are the problem now this according to this Axios piece that I wrote

wrote rather I read which discusses frank lunches findings frank lunches a pollster and he talks about how it is particularly true for Republicans that the language that we use to talk about coronavirus

in the pandemic is threatening and can produce a hostile reaction in them they react instinctively to them so we need to change the language that we use to make it a little make Republicans a little more sympathetic to this crippling pandemic that you're in if you haven't noticed for example you shouldn't be calling them lockdowns

instead of calling them lockdowns call them stay at home orders and you shouldn't call them safety measures instead call them protocols as opposed to mandates directives controls or orders talk about personal responsibility and national duty in order to get people to do things like wear masks

and even the naming of the virus we shouldn't call it call it a pandemic instead of coronavirus because a pandemic sounds more significant and scary this is so strikingly condescending incredibly patronizing the notion that Republicans have are bamboozled by synonyms is more than a little insulting

I mean what you should just call them you know little death panels that's a sort of thing that a Republican can really respond to because it just triggers it just triggers their affection for Sarah Palin and that's something that they will manage to bridge this cognitive gap that they have understanding the pandemic

there is no humility on the part of people who particularly populate newsrooms who are inclined towards a particular outlook that is observable among social engineers who perceive themselves to be capable of reordering the infinitely complex series of engagements that we call society

and creating the conditions that would allow us to navigate this pandemic but also create a better world after the pandemic and people like Thompson there are Thompson at the Atlantic are among many of these people who have been doing this for now the better part of a year

reorganizing how businesses structure themselves literally structure themselves for example in restaurants where seating is going to go he was writing about this in May it's like reordering restaurants

it is there's such striking hubris and no accounting for the predictions that have gone wrong there have been a ton of predictions about how this pandemic would manifest and a lot of them didn't actually materialize but there's no audit there's no retroactive audit of your predictions that go wrong

because you're on to the next atrocious prediction let's going to happen next two weeks

well let's remember the Atlantic's Amanda mall and her piece on the now in the news Brian Kemp the governor of Georgia who is being attacked by Donald Trump for failing to use emergency powers he does not possess to interfere with the certification of the election in Georgia that Joe Biden won

Brian Kemp according to Amanda mall was engaging in human sacrifice just about everybody is quote the headline on her piece which was in May was Georgia's experiment in human sacrifice because he was because he was lifting lockdowns

...