A New York University marketing professor admitted to the titular host of “Real Time with Bill Maher” Friday that the strict lockdowns and school closures he championed during the pandemic were disastrous for kids. He then called for forgiveness absent an apology.
It does not appear that Scott Galloway, a foiled CNN+ host once elected to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Leaders of Tomorrow,” was humbled by the experience of getting something so ruinous so wrong. In the same segment, Galloway signaled ignorance on at least one more issue, this time smearing House Speaker Mike Johnson as a racist.
Galloway of NYU’s Stern School of Business joined disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Cuomo’s former chief of staff Melissa DeRosa on Maher’s show to discuss, among other things, botched handlings of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Just as DeRosa has attempted in her new book, Cuomo massaged the history of his approach to the pandemic in New York, particularly regarding nursing homes, which he forced to take COVID-19-positive patients. Two months after issuing his edict, Cuomo said he would not risk putting his own grandmother in a nursing home.
According to an audit released in March 2022 by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, there were 13,147 nursing home deaths from April 2020 to February 2021. Only 9,076 were reported by Cuomo’s administration.
Galloway seized on the opportunity to claim that social media algorithms incentivized critics to “call out people and really make them look as stupid and mean as possible” — that politicians, institutions, and media personalities such as himself who got it wrong “were doing our best.”
“I was on the board of my kid’s school during COVID. I wanted a harsher lockdown policy,” said Galloway. “In retrospect, I was wrong. The damage to kids of keeping them out of school longer was greater than the risk.”
School closures during the pandemic drove a significant spike in mental illness, suicide, and obesity, as well as widespread learning losses among American children.
Although Galloway appeared at the outset to be working up to an apology, the U.C. Berkeley grad then said, “Here’s the bottom line: Myself, our great people at the CDC, I like to think the governor, we were all operating with imperfect information and we were doing our best.”
Galloway appears not only to have championed the closure of schools — at least one time bemoaning Americans’ fondness for individualism and freedom — but called for coercive vaccinations.
In August 2021, he wrote an opinion piece entitled, “Half of America has its head up its ass. It’s time for a vaccine mandate,” wherein he celebrated the vaccines that CNN reported this week increase the risk of stroke in the elderly and might be causing seizures in children. In addition to accusing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of voluntary manslaughter over his handling of the pandemic, Galloway compared getting a novel vaccine to fighting Hitler.
This was not a on-e-off. Well into the pandemic, he called for public and private vaccine requirements.
“Let’s learn from it, let’s hold each other accountable, but let’s bring a little bit of grace and forgiveness for the s**t show that was COVID,” Galloway told Maher.
Galloway is hardly the first person who got it “wrong” to recommend that those who championed America’s closure should be forgiven.
Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, wrote a piece for the Atlantic last October entitled, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.”
Like Galloway, Oster claimed, “We didn’t know. … [G]etting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing.”
The economist cited the closure of beaches and schools as two examples of “getting it wrong.”
While admitting ignorance, she contended that “the right people were right for the wrong reasons.”
“We need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too,” Oster declared, suggesting that expecting accountability for the “complicated choices” some people made “can lead to a repetitive doom loop.”
Presumably the forgiveness called for by Galloway and Oster would be extended to the 59% of Democratic voters who indicated in a January 2022 Rasmussen Reports survey that they still supported locking the unvaccinated in their homes and the 45% who said they supported the state putting the unvaccinated into camps.
Maher ultimately gave Galloway some push back Friday, indicating that in the case of nursing homes, Florida had done things differently.
Cuomo laughed at the mention of Florida, then said, “On Scott’s point, he’s exactly right. All the early information was wrong.”
While Galloway admitted to having been seriously wrong about lockdowns, his confidence appears not to have been shaken as he made two new suspect claims.
During the “Overtime” portion of the show, the NYU professor revived the debunked Russian collusion narrative, prophesying that in 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin will utilize artificial intelligence, promote “misinformation,” and weaponize social media platforms to “deposition Biden and Harris” and re-elect former President Donald Trump.
On the panel segment of the show, Galloway not only claimed that House Speaker Mike Johnson was an “architect” behind an attempt to destroy democracy but also likened the democratically elected Louisiana Republican to the former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Taking issue with Johnson’s religiosity and the congressman’s sense that his election to the role of speaker was providential, Galloway said, “The whole point here is that we separate church and state, that we believe in a peaceful transfer of power. And the reason this guy is speaker is none of us had the time to read his resume and realize he’s David Duke lite.”
Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov, on the panel with Galloway, applauded the professor’s smear along with the audience.
Although Maher had denigrated Johnson in his monologue, he was ready to indicate that Galloway was off the mark yet again.
“Well, I don’t know if he’s ‘David Duke lite.’ I read today that he has an adopted black son,” said Maher. “I don’t think David Duke would do that.”
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