I wrote in Politico today about the lockdown debate:
An irony of the coronavirus debate is that the more successful lockdowns are in squelching the disease, the more vulnerable they will be to attack as unnecessary in the first place.
A growing chorus on the right—from conservative talk radio hosts to Republican lawmakers like Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Ken Buck of Colorado—is slamming the shutdowns as a panicked overreaction and agitating to end them, hoping to drive a wedge between President Donald Trump and his more cautious advisers.
While there’s no doubt there have been absurd lockdown excesses and we should want to return to normal as soon as plausible, the case against the initial shutdowns is unpersuasive—contradictory and based, even now, on denying the seriousness of Covid-19.
A good example of the genre is an op-ed co-authored by former Education Secretary William Bennett and talk radio host and author Seth Leibsohn. It is titled, tendentiously and not very accurately, “Coronavirus Lessons: Fact and Reason vs. Paranoia and Fear.” Bennett and Leibsohn are intelligent and public-spirited men whom I’ve known for years, but they’ve got this wrong, and in rather elementary ways.