A look back for a moment, the coronavirus pandemic, that would be the virus itself, and our government’s response to it turns out to have been the single most destructive event to take place in the United States in our lifetime — so destructive that it’s going to be many years before we know for certain what the last two and a half years have caused to all of us.
But even now, the outlines of it are clear. COVID crashed our economy first and foremost. GDP fell by the biggest percentage since the Great Depression; 22 million Americans lost their jobs in the first two months of the lockdowns. Remember that?
What you may not know is that at least five million of them never went back to work. They dropped out of the workforce, apparently for good. At the same time, as fewer people were working, thanks to the profligate lunacy of our leaders, our national debt rose by nearly $10 trillion, unprecedented. And along with the debt, our debt to China also rose.
And then at the level of our society, every bad thing became more common: Drug ODs, suicide, illiteracy, crime, all of them skyrocketed. So did obesity, anxiety and alcoholism and virtually every other marker of social decay.
Marriages and birth rates, meanwhile, dropped, so did church attendance.
And none of that is even counting the deaths from the coronavirus itself. That’s a topic that public health authorities have lied about so consistently that we will likely never know what the real number is, but we can be confident the toll was in the hundreds of thousands.
So, on every level, COVID crushed America. Centuries-old traditions just evaporated. It’s a different country, and not a better one. But that doesn’t mean that everybody suffered under COVID. Countless small businesses went under. That devastated our middle class.
But at the same time, thanks to the lockdowns, the tech monopolies thrived. Apple, Google, Amazon all saw their market caps explode. Jeff Bezos wound up much richer than ever before, not that he needed the money.
But no group benefited more from the COVID pandemic than the leaders of Communist China.
