Democrats are beginning to figure out that their power spree during the first two years of COVID was wrong in every single way, and that Americans suffered terribly because of these manifestly wrong decisions. Moreover, it’s becoming obvious that, at all times, they should have known better. For that reason, Democrats are getting excited about a concept The Atlantic is proposing: a “pandemic amnesty.” It’s to be hoped that the millions of ordinary Americans damaged by the Democrats’ COVID policies won’t buy this proposal.

One of the things that’s become apparent almost three years after COVID first hit America is that everything the left said and did was wrong. As was apparent from the cruise ships that had COVID outbreaks in the first half of 2020, we knew from the get-go that COVID victimized old people and people with compromised immune systems, while leaving children and healthy adults almost untouched.

Nevertheless, Democrats shunted COVID-infected people into old-age homes, leading to mass deaths among the most vulnerable. At the same time, they shut down schools, destroying children’s academic development; closed houses of worship, denying people spiritual support during a frightening time; and locked up businesses, except for the big box stores, Democrat donors, alcohol purveyors, pot stores, casinos, etc., effectively destroying working- and middle-class concerns. They lifted the shutdowns only to allow radical leftists to burn American cities.

Democrats then mandated relatively untested vaccines (in government, the military, healthcare, schools, and left-leaning corporations), leading to massive job losses and unnecessary deaths. They also did everything they could to protect China from responsibility, although it’s pretty clear now, as intelligent people realized early on, that COVID originated in a lab, not a wet market.

Image made using Begging for forgiveness (edited) by benzoix, and Lockdown protest (edited) by Becker1999 (CC BY 2.0).

Perhaps worst of all, Democrats used COVID to launch a ferocious attack on free speech. We’re only now learning—thanks to an investigation by the Intercept—just how broad, deep, and comprehensive that attack was. It saw the government actively conspire with social media and other tech companies to silence anyone who opposed the Democrat narrative.

From the get-go, COVID allowed Democrats to exercise raw power to drive Trump from office, game the elections with mail-in voting, terrorize cities, reward supporters and punish opponents, weaken the middle class, and expand the government’s reach. Everything they did was destructive and, often, intentionally so. Their response, in a word, was evil and, again, intentionally so.

But now—like the old cartoon showing a husband amid an utterly chaotic, filthy house, on the phone with his wife while saying, “Come home, dear. All is forgiven”—the Democrats want us to forgive them for their sins and shoulder the clean-up to make America function again.

The Atlantic gets credit for widely promoting the idea in an article from Emily Oster entitled, “Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.” Oster instantly concedes the madness: the social distancing, the useless cloth masks, etc, but excuses it all by saying “We didn’t know.”

Au contraire, Emily. We knew all along. For example, most Trump supporters immediately pointed out that viruses go through cloth masks like a mosquito through a chain-link fence, that 6 feet is meaningless to a virus, that the old are vulnerable and the young are not, that affordable treatments existed if given early enough, and on and on. We knew it all but were shouted down as conspiracy theorists and mass murderers.

So no, you don’t get cheap grace by claiming ignorance. You guys were aggressive, vicious, intentionally ignorant, and totally destructive. Saying the equivalent of “whatever” doesn’t cut it. We need remorse, repentance, and some serious movements toward redemption. However, given the damage caused, it’s hard to imagine how you can redeem yourselves, other than voluntarily confessing guilt and heading to the local federal or state prison.

Of course, leftists don’t see it that way. Exhibit A is Randy Weingarten, the utterly toxic head of the American Federation of Teachers, a childless woman who frantically advocated for school shutdowns, and who is now a big proponent of amnesty:

I agree with @ProfEmilyOster on this https://t.co/lXLjxRcj0E

— Randi Weingarten 🇺🇦🇺🇸💪🏿👩‍🎓 (@rweingarten) October 31, 2022

Weingarten doesn’t deserve amnesty; she deserves prison for her assault on children. And as I already noted, the same goes for everyone on her side of the COVID aisle (including some Republicans).

I know that forgiveness is a virtue, but forgiveness for people who take no responsibility for what they did and are sorry only that they were caught is bad for society at large. A society functions only if we hold people responsible for their intentional or malevolent errors in order to ensure that neither they nor others will ever commit those sins again.