Jazz wrote about this issue earlier this week but it continues to amaze many people how quickly weeks of media hectoring about killing grandma have been abandoned now that there’s a populist left-wing cause that needs defending. At first, you only saw these complaints mostly appearing on the right but slowly the rest of the media is catching up to the glaring hypocrisy. Here’s Dan Diamond’s take at Politico:

The experts maintain that their messages are consistent—that they were always flexible on Americans going outside, that they want protesters to take precautions and that they’re prioritizing public health by demanding an urgent fix to systemic racism.

But their messages are also confounding to many who spent the spring strictly isolated on the advice of health officials, only to hear that the need might not be so absolute after all. It’s particularly nettlesome to conservative skeptics of the all-or-nothing approach to lockdown, whopoint out that many of those same public health experts—a group that tends to skew liberal—widely criticized activists who held largely outdoor protests against lockdowns in April and May, accusing demonstrators of posing a public health danger. Conservatives, who felt their own concerns about long-term economic damage or even mental health costs of lockdown were brushed aside just days or weeks ago, are increasingly asking whether these public health experts are letting their politics sway their health care recommendations.

“Their rules appear ideologically driven as people can only gather for purposes deemed important by the elite central planners,” Brian Blase, who worked on health policy for the Trump administration, told me, an echo of complaints raised by prominent conservative commentators like J.D. Vance and Tim Carney…

“I think what’s lost on people is that there have been real sacrifices made during lockdown,” [Drew] Holden told me. “People who couldn’t bury loved ones. Small businesses destroyed. How can a health expert look those people in the eye and say it was worth it now?”

A couple of days ago Holden who works at the Hill, highlighted this in a Twitter thread that went viral. His premise was simple: The same people who condemned right-leaning protesters as grandma killers are now shrugging off the public health effects of large, daily protests by Black Lives Matter.

Some of the best examples are the pushback to @bethanyshondark for suggesting that some things need to reopen. @joelockhart really led the heinous vitriol, yet he seems to have no issues with the recent protests. pic.twitter.com/HBiMoeQOpE

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

Same sentiment from noted internet swearer @tonyposnanski. Again. No concern about the latest protests. pic.twitter.com/3WCqTGcNhv

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

And this wasn’t @kurteichenwald’s only example. pic.twitter.com/ZasFcTbcaE

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

@GovWhitmer has since dropped these concerns it appears. pic.twitter.com/wwJPT0JOnD

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

And you had the usual pundits. Here’s @JRubinBlogger. Go figure.

Not a peep of concern since. pic.twitter.com/UproZubNw1

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

Apparently the last protest wasn’t good enough for @cmclymer but this one is. The internal logic isn’t even sound. pic.twitter.com/bOQjReeVyg

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

@AprilDRyan doesn’t seem to be asking this question anymore. Wonder why. pic.twitter.com/5lTfjWjfIa

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

The Obama bros don’t seem to have these same misgivings about a lack of social distancing. @jonfavs & @TVietor08 pic.twitter.com/OYoTSNk2tc

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

How could I have possibly forgotten @soledadobrien in the Grandma Killer montage?

Apparently now that we have an “occasion” things are different. pic.twitter.com/9YlTmwV068

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) June 3, 2020

These are really just highlights from blue-checked individuals on the left, but I’ve seen hundreds of regular progressives on Twitter making these same arguments about right-wing protests. Now that it’s BLM protesting, they aren’t complaining. In fact, some on the left are preemptively saying it’s unfair of Trump (or anyone) to blame a future increase in coronavirus infections on the protests:

https://twitter.com/Susan_Hennessey/status/1267075559198273536

Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf has a similar piece which points out the way in which public health officials are suddenly making clearly political (and partisan) arguments. He concludes this will only wind up degrading the credibility of those experts.

On matters of life and death, the reinforcement of progressive social-justice narratives should not get in the way of simple truth-telling. And when it does, it will only undermine the influence of those charged with informing Americans about the pandemic. The fallout: More Americans will decline to heed any public-health advice or journalism, seeing it as ideological and hypocritical.

He’s right of course. Health officials have no right to decide that social justice trumps social distancing. That’s especially true when people have faced real hardships, from loss of jobs to avoiding elderly parents and not attending funerals on the basis of concerns about the virus.

I’m going to wrap this up with another Twitter thread you may not have seen. This one is from Leon Wolf at the Blaze and it goes to the point about the kind of sacrifices people have made in this lockdown which the partisans don’t seem to expect people on their side of the aisle to make or care about.

At the start, let me note that I've been writing online about police brutality, lack of police accountability, and racial injustice for over 15 years to a mostly unreceptive and sometimes hostile audience. So I didn't wake up last week and discover that these things existed. 2/

— Leon Wolf (@LeonHWolf) June 3, 2020

That having been said, I am really fucking pissed off that apparently the life-and-death need to destroy this country was apparently not so life and death. The people who told us and scolded us (including public health experts), who told us there was literally no reason… 4/

— Leon Wolf (@LeonHWolf) June 3, 2020

So, having established that I think the fight for police reform is really important, I have to ask: was it not important to prevent tens of thousands of predicted deaths from suicide due to the psychological effects of the lockdown and ensuing depression? 6/

— Leon Wolf (@LeonHWolf) June 3, 2020

I'll tell you one reason I'm especially raw today. One of my closest and dearest friends died last week. I am going to his funeral today. Thank God it's being held in Arkansas or else it probably couldn't even exist. 8/

— Leon Wolf (@LeonHWolf) June 3, 2020

For the last 8 weeks of his life, he lived totally alone. Even after he had already caught COVID, he was not allowed in person human contact from his friends and family, even if we signed a waiver and promised to not leave the hospital until we ourselves cleared quarantine. 10/

— Leon Wolf (@LeonHWolf) June 3, 2020

Or even mourn them or say goodbye at burials. Because it seems to me that that shit is also pretty damn important to maintaining who we are as human beings. How many people sat there and suffered this same indignity silently because they were told there was no choice? 12/

— Leon Wolf (@LeonHWolf) June 3, 2020

That conclusion is that they didn't really believe what they were saying all along. Because an infectious disease does not care about the reason you are gathering or how important it is. It has no social conscience, or conscience of any kind. 14/

— Leon Wolf (@LeonHWolf) June 3, 2020

So much loss. So much damage. So much grief. For apparently fucking nothing. God, I hope people are held accountable for this somehow. The end. 16/

— Leon Wolf (@LeonHWolf) June 3, 2020

The left, as always, has two standards, one for the groups they dislike and one for those they support. We’re seeing that double-standard play out really clearly right now.