Jeff Childers

The New York Times ran a fascinating story this week headlined “How Some Parents Changed Their Politics in the Pandemic.” The gist is that a lot of parents — especially democrats — have apparently now become single-issue voters. Imagine that.

The Times quoted previously apolitical parent Lisa Longnecker who told the reporter “I wish I’d woken up to this cause sooner. But I can’t think of a single more important issue. It’s going to decide how I vote.”

My gosh. What issue? The WORST POSSIBLE THING. They’re ANTI VAXXERS.

The NYT thinks the shift is a “potentially destabilizing new movement” based on “a single-minded obsession over those issues.”

Destabilizing WHAT?

Hahahaha! What did these jokers think would happen? That, after being threatened every single way government could think of to take their stupid shots, we’d be sending them gift baskets or something?

The Times admitted that polls show half of Americans now oppose masking in any form and oppose vaccine mandates for kids. But the paper was flabbergasted to tap into “the intensity with which some parents have embraced these views.”

This intensity scares the New York Times more than anything:

Their transformation injects an unpredictable element into November’s midterm elections. Fueled by a sense of righteousness after Covid vaccine and mask mandates ended, many of these parents have become increasingly dogmatic, convinced that unless they act, new mandates will be passed after the midterms.
Hahahahaha! I wonder what gives people the crazy idea there could be new mandates after the midterms?? Rubes.

The Times tried to get to the bottom of this bizarre phenomenon. It interviewed TWENTY SEVEN different parents for the story. That’s a lot of work for one story. The interviewed parents all agreed that pandemic policies made them “angry, blaming lawmakers for the disruption to their children’s lives.”

Can you imagine.

The Times cherry-picked some experts who compared anti-mandate parents to people recruited into a cult. Renée DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory who has studied anti-vaccine activism, said the movement had indoctrinated parents into feeling “like they are part of their community, and that community supports specific candidates or policies.”

Take note: they are STUDYING “anti-vaccine activism.”

In any case, as the Times is keenly aware, all of this dogmatic righteousness is not terrific news for the party of mandates — and they know it. Dan Pfeiffer, one of Obama’s political advisers, explained that “a lot of Democrats might think these voters are now unreachable, even if they voted for the party recently.”

Unreachable.

The article then described three formerly liberal couples who are parents — two couples were dems and one was independent — who got worried about their kids during lockdowns. Their friends just told them to stop whining and being selfish and threatened to cancel them. So they “found a community on Facebook.”

The Times was appalled to discover one of the former democrats actually became a MODERATOR of the “Keep NYC Schools Open” Facebook group. “I found my people,” Ms. Levy said. She said she found Republicans “understood that for us, worse than the virus was having our kid trapped at home and out of school.”

My goodness. Not Republicans!

According to the Times, for these disaffected parents, Facebook became a gateway drug to extremism:

The Facebook groups were just the beginning of an online journey that took some parents from more mainstream views of reopening schools toward a single-issue position.
Even more alarming to the Times, if that’s possible, was the fact that these parents began to believe the insane notion that the “right to self-determination so that parents could decide what vaccines their children took was paramount.”

Not just covid vaccines. ALL vaccines.

This crazy idea about bodily autonomy made “parents seeth[] at the authorities, arguing they had no right to tell them what to do with their children’s bodies.” That was bad enough. But what really terrifies the Times are the political ramifications:

By late last year, the talk among parent groups on Facebook, Telegram and Instagram had shifted from vaccine dangers to taking action in the midterms.
As a former democrat parent interviewed for the story explained, “I’m a single-issue voter now, and I can’t see myself supporting Democratic Party candidates unless they show they fought to keep our kids in school and let parents make decisions about masks and vaccines.”

Not good.

The Times really seems to be struggling, struggling to understand this movement, and the paper can’t decide whether to just ignore and marginalize these formerly-reliable voters, call them domestic terrorists, or try to win them back somehow.

To help them understand what’s going on, I offer the New York Times four words: equal and opposite reaction.

Or, I could even boil it down into just two words: War Moms.