{"id":654929,"date":"2025-03-09T11:23:25","date_gmt":"2025-03-09T15:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/?p=654929"},"modified":"2025-03-09T12:50:14","modified_gmt":"2025-03-09T16:50:14","slug":"jeff-childers-sunday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/?p=654929","title":{"rendered":"JEFF CHILDERS SUNDAY"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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\u2019s solid youth support sound like pure good fortune. But this time, they might, sort of, have been onto something\u2014 an increasingly difficult-to-deny fact:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start by ripping off the fake news band-aid, arm hair and all. The Atlantic\u2019s illogical sleight of hand was deceptively blaming the virus for the political trend, rather than correctly attributing the ideological shift to the government\u2019s misbegotten response to the virus. In other words, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow a Bullet Killed Farmer Johnson.\u201d True, but it was the armed IRS Agent holding the gun who pulled the trigger. If the Atlantic\u2019s logic held up, we\u2019d 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\u2019t the disease\u2014it was the response to the disease, the lockdowns, the mandates, the gaslighting, the economic devastation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just here in the USA. The Germans have even minted a gutteral noun for the phenomenon: Rechstruck, a rightward shift. \u201cFar-right parties are surging across Europe\u2014and young voters are buying in,\u201d a Politico article reported last year. The Atlantic gloomily reported that the \u201cfar-right\u201d Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland (AfD) is now the most popular party among Germans under 30. The same is true in France, Finland, \u201cand beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Atlantic says experts are baffled by this Rechstruck. Initially, the Atlantic discounted pandemic effects, describing a marxist utopian ideal that government\u2019s heavy hand should have \u201cunited people behind a vision of collective sacrifice.\u201d They sure tried to sell it that way. But the article worked around to a recent British polysci \u201cstudy\u201d titled, \u201cThe political scar of epidemics: why COVID-19 is eroding young people\u2019s trust in their leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n

Critical reading tip: whenever media or academy attributes agency to inanimate objects like viruses, you\u2019re reading fake news. But, I digress.<\/p>\n

The covid study, in turn, relied on a Gallup poll conducted between 2006-2018. It surveyed people\u2019s trust in their government, elections, and political leadership:<\/p>\n

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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\u2019t recapitulate my scorn for academic models, which are nothing more than guesses dressed in doublespeak. You\u2019ll recall, I\u2019m sure, all the (badly wrong) models of covid death rates used to justify lockdowns and malicious mitigation measures.<\/p>\n

Their \u201ctheory\u201d 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 \u201cin institutions.\u201d And, for some reason, especially young people.<\/p>\n

I have a counter-theory. My counter-theory is that 18 to 24-year-olds aren\u2019t stupid. They just don\u2019t usually pay attention to politics because they are busy getting degrees and finding marital partners and they don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2014 and otherwise stay out of our hair.<\/p>\n

I tried to warn them for years. I stood athwart the railroad tracks of authoritarianism yelling \u201cstop!\u201d But they wouldn\u2019t listen. And now, the once-unstoppable progressive movement \u2014 bending the arc of history toward equity \u2014 is experiencing a massive pandemic hangover.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s another covid miracle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s solid youth support sound like pure good fortune. But … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-654929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=654929"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":654942,"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654929\/revisions\/654942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=654929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=654929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldtadise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=654929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}