Proving the Point at Saint Vincent CollegeA conference on elite cowardice is denounced by the university that hosted it.
By Jacob Howland
April 13, 2022
This past weekend, attendees at a conference at Saint Vincent College learned that on Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media alternative to Twitter (which banned him in January 2020), users compose “truths” instead of “tweets.” Last month, technical glitches caused the new platform to acknowledge that it was “currently experiencing slow distribution of truths.” That and its corollary, the swift proliferation of falsehoods, describe much of public life in the era of COVID. The nine conference speakers, assembled by Brad Watson, director of Saint Vincent’s Center for Political and Economic Thought, addressed the atmosphere of crisis and panic that has driven the policies of government and private organizations and transformed educational and cultural institutions since March 2020. The conference, titled “Politics, Policy, and Panic: Governing in a Time of Crisis,” assessed how these developments have damaged constitutional government, the rule of law, and the well-being of the American people. Yet its existence induced an ironic moral panic in Saint Vincent’s administration, which has now issued a groveling letter of apology for the alleged sins of one of the speakers and forbidden Watson to post videos of any of the lectures.
Governing elites and institutional and corporate leaders are generally vociferous supporters of social justice. Yet speaker after speaker showed how these groups have cruelly abandoned broad swathes of vulnerable Americans—including children, the working class, black Americans, and the urban poor—in implementing scientifically uninformed, politically partisan, and self-serving policies.
The first talks focused on the ruinous effects of governmental responses to COVID. Scott Atlas, who in 2020 served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, presented data detailing the devastating and entirely foreseeable costs of lockdowns, which contravened long-established best practices for handling pandemics. Lockdowns produced serious learning loss; increased child abuse, substance abuse, and psychiatric illness; extensive unemployment for low-wage earners; missed cancer treatments and undetected illnesses; and exploding obesity. Some Saint Vincent faculty members who did not attend Atlas’ talk objected to his inclusion in the conference.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/13/proving-the-point-at-saint-vincent-college/
