IT'S OKAY TO BE AN UPMARKET ELITIST IF YOU'RE BASHING LIBERALS

Here's the latest hotness: Everyone is over the pandemic except for scaredy-cat liberals who have a totalitarian desire to impose their fears on everyone else.

This.https://t.co/3uuu6fi2JB

— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) January 23, 2022

NBC's write-up of that poll is here; the numbers are here. Here's the question (the numbers are actually slightly more one-sided-- 65% to 30%):

(Click to enlarge.)

But maybe this is unsurprising. Nobody wants kids to fall behind in school. And it's likely that much of America now believes that there's simply no way to prevent the spread of the virus.

This comes at a time when professional demagogue Bari Weiss is being applauded on the right for telling Bill Maher that, as far as she's concerned, COVID is over.

Speaking on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, the Substack journalist declared that she is 'done with covid!'

'We were told you get the vaccine, you get the vaccine and you get back to normal. And we haven't gotten back to normal. And it's ridiculous at this point,' Weiss began on the HBO show.

'I know that so many of my liberal and progressive friends are with me on this and they do not want to say it out loud because they are scared to be called anti-vaxxed or to be called science deniers or to be smeared as a Trumper,' Weiss explained.

'I'm sorry, but if you believe the science, you will look at the data that we did not have two years ago and you will find out that cloth masks do not do anything. You will realize that you can show your vaccine passport at a restaurant and still be asymptomatic in carrying Omicron. And you realize, most importantly, that this will be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.'

The most impressive thing about Bari Weiss on last night’s Bill Maher is the wild applause after she finishes here. After two years the tides are turning, even for the left leaning people in this country when it comes to covid. Watch this: pic.twitter.com/8DIH3zTibM

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 22, 2022

That NBC poll suggests that Real Americans are on Weiss's side, right? No, not really. The percentage of Americans who believe that COVID isn't a major problem has barely budged in recent months -- or, actually, since 2020. And the percentage who believe that "the worst is yet to come" has increased significantly since October -- as you'd expect, given the emergence of Omicron.

And the fact that 44% of respondents believe the worst is over doesn't mean that the majority are acting as if there's nothing to worry about anymore. Consider this:

On a 0-to-10 scale, when asked to describe how focused on COVID they are when making day-to-day decisions, 55% rank their pandemic focus as 6 to 10, and only 33% rank it as 0-4 (and 13% are right in the middle). Most of these people know they can't simply declare themselves "done with COVID."

Alex Pareene lives in Brooklyn, works from home, has a wife who also works from home, and sends a child to a school with -- surprise, Fox viewers! -- in-person learning. In a post on his Substack, he notes that most everything in his world is open for business, as is most everything in America. People in his world are taking precautions, but they're getting on with their lives, though that's not the case for everyone in America.

“Normal” is still an impossible state of affairs for an untold number of people with immunodeficiency or hospital jobs or dead parents or lost homes. Our schools here are open (except when classes go remote, as they regularly do, because, again, so many people are catching Covid-19), but parents everywhere are understandably at the ends of their ropes in the current surge. We’re deeply relieved our kid just became vaccine-eligible; others might still wait a year or more.

But, with a couple exceptions, those sorts of people, with legitimate complaints about what the unchecked spread of the virus has done to their lives, aren’t really the ones you actually see complaining so goddamn much, because most of those sorts of people don’t have the sorts of platforms that would lead me to come across their complaints. It is very much mainly people in households very much like mine (or ones that have it even easier!) that are the primary sources of the most well-publicized opining on how This Has Gone On Long Enough and It’s Time For the Democrats to Say Enough Is Enough and Make It Stop.

... The people in the press and on social media complaining the loudest about Covid-19 restrictions are, at this point, people for whom Covid-19 is just a thing they are sick of hearing and thinking about.

We're generally told to disdain the opinions of upmarket urban elitists. They shop at Whole Foods! They drive Priuses! What do they know about the concerns of salt-of-the-earth American heartlanders sitting in rural diners with dirt under their fingernails? But now we're told that upmarket elitists who are trying to wish away the pandemic have a monopoly on truth and an acute sense of what salt-of-the-earth Americans really believe. I guess anyone who bashes liberals is an honorary Real American, and the rest of us, in all social classes, should just keep our mouths shut.