Speaking of broken clocks and blind squirrels, the Atlantic accidentally stumbled over a deeper truth late last month. The dramatic story was trying to find an excuse that could make Trump’s solid youth support sound like pure good fortune. But this time, they might, sort of, have been onto something— an increasingly difficult-to-deny fact:

Let’s start by ripping off the fake news band-aid, arm hair and all. The Atlantic’s illogical sleight of hand was deceptively blaming the virus for the political trend, rather than correctly attributing the ideological shift to the government’s misbegotten response to the virus. In other words, it’s a type of correlation-causation fallacy; they attributed a political effect to a temporally proximal biological cause, instead of to the proper preceding political provocation.

“How a Bullet Killed Farmer Johnson.” True, but it was the armed IRS Agent holding the gun who pulled the trigger. If the Atlantic’s logic held up, we’d expect other pandemics to produce similar generational political shifts. Did the Spanish Flu make people more conservative? The Black Death? The Four Corners Hantavirus Outbreak of 1976? No, only covid. Only covid because it wasn’t the disease—it was the response to the disease, the lockdowns, the mandates, the gaslighting, the economic devastation.

It’s not just here in the USA. The Germans have even minted a gutteral noun for the phenomenon: Rechstruck, a rightward shift. “Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,” a Politico article reported last year. The Atlantic gloomily reported that the “far-right” Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now the most popular party among Germans under 30. The same is true in France, Finland, “and beyond.”

The Atlantic says experts are baffled by this Rechstruck. Initially, the Atlantic discounted pandemic effects, describing a marxist utopian ideal that government’s heavy hand should have “united people behind a vision of collective sacrifice.” They sure tried to sell it that way. But the article worked around to a recent British polysci “study” titled, “The political scar of epidemics: why COVID-19 is eroding young people’s trust in their leaders.”

Critical reading tip: whenever media or academy attributes agency to inanimate objects like viruses, you’re reading fake news. But, I digress.

The covid study, in turn, relied on a Gallup poll conducted between 2006-2018. It surveyed people’s trust in their government, elections, and political leadership:

They created an impenetrable statistical model that allowed them to correlate conservative beliefs among 18 to 24-year-olds to epidemics in various countries. I won’t recapitulate my scorn for academic models, which are nothing more than guesses dressed in doublespeak. You’ll recall, I’m sure, all the (badly wrong) models of covid death rates used to justify lockdowns and malicious mitigation measures.

Their “theory” was that no government is perfect, and since imperfect governments gamely responding to crises create resentment at the margins where they fail, people lose trust “in institutions.” And, for some reason, especially young people.

I have a counter-theory. My counter-theory is that 18 to 24-year-olds aren’t stupid. They just don’t usually pay attention to politics because they are busy getting degrees and finding marital partners and they don’t have any money to defend. But when politics makes them pay attention, through authoritarian excess like closing their schools, canceling their concerts, and forcing them to take shots bursting with side effects, they get an early education in how awful government really is.

In other words, the same people who locked kids in their dorm rooms and called them murderers for wanting fresh air now act confused that those kids aren’t voting for more of the same. But why should they trust government, when it is so painfully unable to accomplish anything productive without graft, corruption, and diktat? The pandemic provided decades of learning the hard way that the best formula is to let government build roads and defend the borders— and otherwise stay out of our hair.

I tried to warn them for years. I stood athwart the railroad tracks of authoritarianism yelling “stop!” But they wouldn’t listen. And now, the once-unstoppable progressive movement — bending the arc of history toward equity — is experiencing a massive pandemic hangover.

It’s another covid miracle.