Buttigieg: Gee, I Wish We Had Opened Schools in 2020

It’s a neat trick, if you can get away with it. 

Punish, censor, debank, demonetize, slander, impose damaging and arbitrary rules that ruin lives and cause immeasurable harm. Use your policies to gain political advantage and monetary gain, and when the grift gets exposed…shrug, say it was a minor error, and garner applause for political bravery. 

You get all the benefits you can grab from imposing horrible policies, and you get all the benefits from doing a U-turn and showing political “growth.” Rinse, repeat. 

I wrote in May of 2020 that the data showed there was political bias in coverage Fl’s DeSantis & NY’s Cuomo, Blue Anon accused me of being a DeSantis apologist (he was hiding deaths, they claimed)

There’s no way a Dem pol could’ve admitted the truth about all this at the time pic.twitter.com/h63K5wYNCJ

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) May 28, 2025

Pete Buttigieg is obviously running for president, and during the COVID pandemic, he seized on and stoked fear of the virus to trash his political opponents. We were grandma killers. We were hostile to teachers and students. We were evil, evil people who only cared about ourselves. 

They were right, and Buttigieg and his cohort were disastrously wrong, causing one of the largest mental health and educational crises in history, not to mention economic ruin for anybody who didn’t comply. 

Link: https://t.co/ZmjITwOqTY

— John Hasson (@SonofHas) May 28, 2025

Everybody makes mistakes, so what makes this one unforgivable is that plenty of people were on the right side of the issue, and people like Buttigieg and almost every member of the Democratic Party worked overtime to suppress all discussions of the pros and cons. We kept being lied to that the Biden administration was “following the evidence,” but that was a total lie. They suppressed the evidence, which by mid-2020 was overwhelming that closing schools would have disastrous consequences. 

Pete Buttigieg told @BulwarkOnline that if he could do it over, he would’ve worked to get the schools open faster in 2020. In response, @TaylorLorenz denounced him as a eugenicist.

Meanwhile, @DavidZweig’s new book presents an avalanche of evidence indicating that school… pic.twitter.com/H5pkRNUr9U

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) May 28, 2025

That evidence was suppressed, and there is no scientific or public health reason for that suppression. It was pure politics, and all the evidence is that it worked to undermine Donald Trump’s bid for reelection. The pandemic gave us a master class in Orwellian propaganda and speech suppression, and no shrugging and kinda-sorta admission that they got it wrong is sufficient. 

There is no acknowledgement that suppressing discussion was wrong. No self-reflection on the biggest issue–the betrayal of science, the Constitution, and the wanton destruction of people’s lives. 

“Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.” https://t.co/23M2oywdij

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) May 28, 2025

Instead, Buttiegieg and company congratulate themselves for “trying to save lives,” which is rich. They cost innumerable lives, and that should count for something. 

It won’t, because the Buttigieg class of technocrats has unlimited belief in their right to rule. Little things like consequences are minor considerations. 

Getting something so big and catastrophically wrong matters, just as the massive failure of “Defund the Police” does. 

Good judgment when it counts matters. If Buttigieg had stepped up to the plate and, after reviewing the evidence in 2020, said, “This is wrong,” he would deserve credit. Making a mistake in the midst of a crisis is understandable. 

Acknowledging five years later that “mistakes were made” counts for nothing. 

UPDATE: Taylor Lorenz is upset with Mayor Pete for deviating from the party line of the past. 

“Pete saying he would have ‘opened the schools sooner’ in 2020 aka killing MORE vulnerable ppl faster, sacrificing teachers and educators (and kids!) lives to force them back into unventilated buildings w no protections,” wrote the New York Times and Washington Post alum in a post on X. “Disgusting how Dems have fully embraced far right eugenics.”

Of course, Taylor was so insane that The New York Times and Washington Post platformed her for years. As you recall, she celebrated Luigi Mangione as a “moral man” and expressed glee that Biden suffers from cancer.

Despite her professed horror at the thought of anyone dying needlessly, Lorenz recently celebrated Biden’s cancer diagnosis, replying “Hopefully he rots in hell and rests in piece” to one fan of the ex-president.

She had previously raised eyebrows by rejoicing over the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December.

Compared to Taylor, Mayor Pete looks great.