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I am not a journalist, or an academic. I began writing about our novel coronavirus to divert myself in March 2020 in response to the deluge of bad information pouring from our media. I had days to fill, and found myself responding to daily headlines and interactions with friends and family, all in real time. I had no specific plans for any of it. I don’t know an editor, and would not be given space in any media outlet that most Americans have heard of. The entries of my journal were all written contemporaneously, usually within a few weeks of the stories I was responding to, often written in response to the morning’s headlines. Although I later cleaned things up a bit, I didn’t re-write or add information that I didn’t have at the time of the initial writing.

The media refrain of 2020 was We don’t know anything. We didn’t know then, and we don’t know now. Perhaps we will never know. It was a lie, but it allowed them to sell fear, to tell us who to hate, to tell us what we could and couldn’t do. (“Is it safe to get takeout or visit your doctor? We surveyed epidemiologists for answers.”) The press could have reported so much useful information about how the virus spreads, about the risks to the elderly and the compromised (especially obese people), about risks to people in cool dry environments such as meat-packing plants. They could have shown us diagrams of superspreader events or told us that the duration of exposure mattered or that we wouldn’t catch it outdoors, but they instead sold us confusion and fear and politics.

As the inane headlines and misleading information came in, I tried to counter it with what I knew from my own observations and research. The media and their “experts” pretended we learned the outdoors was safe only in June after the protests and riots began, but we had the studies in April. They simply refused to acknowledge them, as it was more lucrative and more appealing politically to pretend everywhere was equally dangerous.

I have labeled the entries to indicate when I wrote them. If I write about news stories or just-released “studies” in May, my information and arguments come from May, not from a later date after we got new information. My coronavirus data—usually expressed as fatalities per million—were also contemporaneous with the stories. I resisted adding footnotes and updates. The mantra from our professional fear-mongers has been that we simply didn’t know anything, and I hope that some of my entries might help readers recall that they did, in fact, know better than the headlines were telling us.

The path that led here:

In the winter of 2019, I visited Berlin for the first time. I listened to Berlin at War, by Roger Moorehouse, as I walked the city. I visited Sachsenhausen, the Nazi concentration camp north of the city. My guide was a sensitive young French Jew who told us that he couldn’t lead this tour more than a couple of times without getting nightmares. He pointed out the suburban houses that lined the walk from the train station to the camp, making it clear that local Germans knew, at least in part, what was going on.

The guide showed us a contraption called a Genickschussanlage (“neck shooting facility”), into which a prisoner was led under the guise of having his height measured. On the other side of the wall was a soldier who executed the prisoner with a shot to the back of the head through small hole in the wall.

My fellow tourists asked our guide how such things could have happened in a civilized European country not so long ago. I wondered to myself about the brutality of the First World War, about the street violence between communists and Nazis through the 1920s and 1930s, about German militarism and the Freikorps, about the void left by the collapse of old Europe, about thousands of years of European anti-semitism. The guide, however, asked us if we’d heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment. His belief was that twenty minutes of a college psych experiment could turn people into beasts. We are supposed to believe such things. Although I was aware of the experiment, suddenly I knew that its premise was false, which I confirmed as soon as I had a moment to get online and take a look.

I had left my busy career as a retail sales regional manager in 2016, shortly before the 2016 presidential election. I had never watched TV news or read newspapers. I couldn’t have named the governor of New York, or even of my own state of Colorado. Now I tuned in to see if there was anything to learn about the surprise election of Trump, and I quickly realized the media weren’t interested in research or information or anything true. They were interested in fables, in neat but false stories (or at least vastly oversimplified stories) about the world we live in.

I became interested in looking under the headline stories, which were now nearly always about race and gender, about inequality, about “marginalized” people, racism, sexism, oppression. A few public intellectuals told us that Americans built wealth by buying houses with bank loans, and suddenly every politician and talking head repeated it as if it were true.

In early 2020 I was reading and thinking and writing—for myself, without thought of publication—about these wide variations in wealth outcomes among people and groups of people, when our new pandemic began to creep into the headlines. It was clear immediately that the press wouldn’t get it right, that they would double-down on their pet themes no matter how much information there might be to learn and to report. When an opportunity to provide valuable information, they would deliver their standard meanness and cruelty.

I was alone, in a beautiful sunny Colorado high-plains winter, with nowhere to go, no one to see. We were without the spectacle of sports, movie releases, or political debates to feed the headlines and provide distraction. I grilled a lot of great meals on my porch. As the stock market plummeted, I imagined the press and our public intellectuals rejoicing at the sudden reduction in inequality—but I knew they were capable of no such thing. In the face of our novel coronavirus, we would get more of the same, more strident than ever.

I noticed that my reading and ciphering began to evolve from wealth disparities to the pandemic. People I knew repeated things they read in the headlines, which were obviously untrue, the product of lazy journalists without competent or attentive editors.

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