Perhaps the most jarring thing about Berenson’s presence on Twitter is not his ruthlessness but his lack of empathy. When a marijuana policy figure he dealt with died last July, Berenson tweeted, “This is where I am supposed to say that, although we disagreed, he was intelligent and deeply concerned about public policy.” Instead, he followed up with a Latin phrase about not speaking ill of the dead. When Mr. Berenson learned that one of his enemies on Twitter, Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie, had lost his grandfather to the virus, he continued to argue, writing that he also had dead grandparents, and “the world does not he didn’t stop for them either.
This coldness about death is at the heart of Berenson’s overarching political vision: that we simply need to accept the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans from the virus, and that the social and economic damage from the blockades is wasted. It is an argument without blood, but honest. And he does so on the last page of his brochure, doing mathematical calculations to project the worst-case scenario of an additional 600,000 American deaths. (The number is more or less in sync with other projections, although there is no consensus on how many more years victims of the virus could have lived.)
“Over the course of a year or two, the coronavirus is likely to have little or no impact on the total number of Americans who die,” he writes, describing it as a mere 3 percent increase.
That math is at the core of any serious argument about the tradeoffs between illness and blockages, even if you accept the global public health consensus that blocks are effective (that Mr. Berenson does not). But even public figures who oppose the blockades rarely say it out loud. President Trump does not ignore the deaths. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whom Berenson applauded when he resisted closing, does not flaunt the daily death tolls that have sometimes exceeded 100. Berenson suggests that the reason no political leader has made this case is a reflection of media hysteria. I think it can reflect ordinary human policy, which places a high value on the lives of citizens, even the elderly.
The pain caused by the blockages is also real. And that means that Mr. Berenson, Mr. Windsor and, of course, President Trump, will continue to find an audience.
“I’m done with his constitutional violations and took advantage of my economic production capacity,” the desperate wedding venue operator wrote to the Ohio lieutenant governor on Facebook in April, in a message I got under the state’s public records law. “The order for May 1 is better to have provisions for wedding venues.”
The author of that Facebook message was Jack Windsor. A week later, he had obtained a small independent television station to give him a press pass, and became the means of communication.
Lucia Walinchus contributed reporting.
