The Magical Thinking of the NYT’s Charles Blow

CLAY: I thought, Buck, you would enjoy this. Charles Blow is a New York Times columnist.

BUCK: Oh, I know Charles.

CLAY: He tweeted out… You know Charles. You guys used to be on CNN together occasionally.

BUCK: A couple times, yeah.

CLAY: He tweeted out a map of the nationwide hot spots for covid. And all of the southern United States — the places that Dr. Fauci told us covid would be feasting on because college football stadiums were opening up. He says, “I’m mystified about how these southern states have such low rates of covid when many of their governors haven’t followed CDC guidance. Someone please explain this to me.”

Now, it’s easy to make fun of him, but the number of blue checks out there, Buck, who have never been willing to actually look at the data themselves and have just been complete and total covid sheep is staggering. Florida has right now one-third the rate of covid as California, less than half the rate of New York.

No vaccine mandates. No mask mandates. Much of covid is seasonal. Florida has their rise during the summer when everybody goes inside because it’s super hot and everybody’s inside with the air-conditioning. That’s a strong theory. And the vaccine mandates, the CDC rules on masking, distancing, everything else, they never worked. They’ve always been a farce.

BUCK: What you end up seeing here — and this is gonna happen a lot. And, by the way, I think everybody should be prepared for this particularly over the winter season when I think, unfortunately, even in places like New York and places like Los Angeles and Houston where they have Democrats running the city, at least, and pretty high vaccination rates overall, there’s is gonna be covid.

There’s gonna be a covid wave. How big it is, hopefully very, very small but there will be a covid wave and there will be people who look at the data and say, “But this can’t be, but this can’t be.” Clay, they think that they’re basing these decisions on the science, but what we keep running up against are people for whom their ideology creates cognitive dissonance with the science.

“It cannot be that Fauci and the rest have been wrong on this once again. It can’t be that the numbers I’m seeing are what they are,” and so don’t think that just because… I mean, this has been the case on masking all along, right? Every time we show or see that masking doesn’t work, they go, “No, it still works,” and you say, “How can you believe this?” But they do. Doesn’t matter.

CLAY: It’s magical thinking. And, unfortunately, it has an absolutely massively deleterious effect on the overall country as a whole.