While the general consensus on the right (outside of Never Trumper la la land) is that the lockdowns mandated by Democratic governors since the early days of the Wuhan virus crisis were not only the wrong solution but also unconstitutional, the general consensus on the left and in the media (but I repeat myself) is that the parts of the country in lockdown mode should stay that way until the coronavirus is completely eradicated (which as we all know will not happen).

And the parts that aren’t (Florida and South Dakota, among others), they say, should be forced into mandating lockdowns on their states by the federal government.

Because the MSM and Democrats control so much of the TV/radio airwaves, print and online media, and have Hollywood celebrities in their back pockets (among other, ahem, places that we won’t get into too much detail about), they have a much higher degree of control over pandemic narratives, like the one about how Republican governors are grandma killers for not wanting to totally shut down their states, and the one about how the vaccine was going to be unsafe if approved before the end of the year because Orange Man Bad.

But every once in a while you stumble across someone on the left who shows some clear and level-headed thinking about the pandemic response beyond the herd mentality that goes along with being a Democrat these days.

Such was the case for Twitter user Genève Campbell, a self-described leftist who wrote a 16 tweet thread on Tuesday looking back at how America – Democratic states in particular – had responded to the pandemic over the last 8+ months.

She clearly put a lot of thought into it, careful but forthright in what she wrote. It was almost like she was admitting things she was reluctant to but nevertheless felt compelled to say out of a moral obligation to speak out.

Her thread was long (you can read it unrolled here) but I still wanted to share her thoughts here, which I think give a good insight into the mindset of the serious-minded leftists out there who are rethinking everything they (and we) have been told about how lockdowns are the only way to “manage” this crisis, but are too afraid to express openly because of the inevitable hateful accusations that usually follow:

I want to say something about our pandemic response and groupthink, especially as it relates to the current scientific discourse in the United States.

Stick with me here.

🧵
1/

— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) December 22, 2020

Except at this stage in our technological advancement, we prefer to imagine that we’re immune to the same in-group/out-group dynamics. At one time, remember, the Ptolemaic system was the Prevailing Science, too. It took a century+ for heliocentrism to be widely accepted.
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— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) December 22, 2020

Initially doubling down on failed recommendations which cause enormous, grotesque collateral harms is something I expect from politicians — such is the nature of politics, the dynamics of power. But not from scientists. (And not from “my” team, to put it crudely. I was naive.)
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— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) December 22, 2020

And here is where “epistemic closure,” I believe, is in danger of becoming “epistemic collapse.”

Nothing like this — what we are living through in most deep-Blue metro areas, primarily — has been tried at this scale in the entirety of human history.
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— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) December 22, 2020

THIS is what is new and wholly experimental. Despite what many seem to think, 1918 flu restrictions were not at this scale. Not by many orders of magnitude, even. (And this for a virus with an average age of death of 28, versus 80 for our current pandemic.)
9/

— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) December 22, 2020

We are permanently stuck in a doomloop from early Spring. Media sensationalism feeds public opinion, which is fed back into political (re)action by pseudo-responsive democratic elite and policymakers, which then stokes more media sensationalism which then… yeah.
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— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) December 22, 2020

Maybe we made the right decision, ethically.

But the deeply troubling thing is that we did it, accepting and implementing it, uncritically and without open discussion of tradeoffs and second-order effects. We marched immediately and in lockstep.
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— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) December 22, 2020

How did we end up here? Sometimes I feel like we entered an alternate universe around the time of the Lombardy lockdown.

The cure for scurvy was eventually rediscovered. And that gives me hope. But I fear the short- and medium-term.
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— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) December 22, 2020

And we kinda just… fell into it. Like Alice down the rabbit hole.

I’m not sure how we can roll this back. Not sure we have the collective introspection to challenge the in-group dynamic, to admit that we behaved as nodes in a social phenomenon.

And that terrifies me.
/END

— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) December 22, 2020

Some of the points she made are similar to those many on the right have made about how there was a mad push by the media and Democrats to go full throttle on lockdowns almost immediately without really thinking it through. But her commentary just goes to show that, contra to what we on the right might think, that there are indeed cracks in the leftist dam on the lockdowns, and they’re only going to get deeper the longer this goes on. Not many of them want to admit it, but they, too, have had family members and friends who have suffered since the lockdowns started, financially and emotionally. For some of them, none of it makes any sense anymore.

The right can’t get Democrats to see the light on this, but maybe more voices speaking out on the left like Campbell’s will open some eyes both in the media – and in government. We need all the allies we can get in this fight, and many more voices from the left like Campbell’s. We don’t have to see eye to eye on every issue, but on the issue of lockdowns, I’m willing to stand alongside any leftist/Democrat who gets it.

Related: CNN’s Chris Cuomo Has Meltdown Over Marco Rubio Tweet About Lockdowns, It Didn’t Go Well