{"id":846216,"date":"2026-06-05T13:35:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T13:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/846216\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T13:35:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T13:35:19","slug":"remember-june-5-when-the-elites-shattered-americas-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/846216\/","title":{"rendered":"Remember June 5 \u2014 when the elites shattered America&#8217;s trust"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Every year for the last six, we\u2019ve commemorated the key dates of the <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2026\/03\/18\/us-news\/covid-19-death-toll-in-early-days-of-the-pandemic-undercounted-by-over-150k-study\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">COVID-19 saga<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>March 11, when the World Health Organization officially <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2020\/03\/11\/world-health-organization-declares-coronavirus-a-pandemic\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">declared the novel coronavirus to be a global pandemic.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>March 13, when the US government declared a nationwide emergency and we started hearing about \u201ctwo weeks to flatten the curve.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>March 16, the day New York City closed its schools and locked down most businesses.<\/p>\n<p>The standard timeline, though, obscures some of the anniversaries that we urgently must remember.<\/p>\n<p>On May 26, with New York City and many states still in lockdown mode, the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis began in earnest.<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tKarol Markowicz<\/p>\n<p>The protests swelled and many devolved into riots, spreading throughout the country.<\/p>\n<p>By May 28, after the Minneapolis Police Department\u2019s Third Precinct station was set on fire, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz mobilized the state\u2019s National Guard.<\/p>\n<p>On June 1, the looting and rioting had gotten so bad in New York City that Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed a curfew.<\/p>\n<p>And on that same day, health officials and infectious disease experts were quietly gathering signatures on an \u201cOpen Letter Advocating for an Anti-Racist Public Health Response to Demonstrations Against Systemic Injustice Occurring During the COVID-19 Pandemic,\u201d imploring Americans to ignore the lockdown orders \u2014 in order to join the George Floyd demonstrations.<\/p>\n<p>On June 5, when CNN published that letter, it bore the names and carried the imprimatur of more than 1,200 medical professionals.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhite supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,\u201d they lectured us.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s why, \u201cas public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings\u201d \u2014 read: violent protests \u2014 \u201cas risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Extra galling, the letter made a point to condemn a protest in Lansing, Mich. \u2014 because that one was organized to demand an end to the lockdowns that were destroying lives and livelihoods.<\/p>\n<p>The Lansing demonstration, the signers said, triggered them to \u201cprivately mourn the widening rift between leaders in science and a subset of the communities that they serve.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It was a bad joke: Those \u201cleaders\u201d went on to turn the rift into a gaping gulf.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2020\/06\/07\/new-york-city-re-opens-under-phase-one-on-monday\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Businesses were still closed<\/a> \u2014 NYC didn\u2019t start its cautious and painfully slow reopening process until June 7.<\/p>\n<p>Children as young as 2 years old were forced to mask.<\/p>\n<p>Elderly people died alone, unable to see family, unable to say goodbye.<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet opinions and commentary from our columnists\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p class=\"inline-module__cta\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>We were gripped by mania \u2014 and the people pushing that mania, the same health officials who were adamant that leaving our house meant everyone would die, gave a free pass to protesters to do whatever they wanted, because they liked the cause.<\/p>\n<p>On June 2, 2020, I was asking about the double standard <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2020\/06\/02\/if-protesters-can-march-why-cant-businesses-open\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">in these pages<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe protests have exposed the absurdity of the continued lockdowns,\u201d I wrote.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s either a public-health emergency and crowds must be stopped or it\u2019s not. It cannot be both.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Somehow, the experts were immune to such common sense.<\/p>\n<p>Eric S. Raymond, a prominent software developer and author, refers to June 5, 2020, as \u201cFracture Day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was the day we realized that even the most supposedly disinterested of our institutions had been captured by overt enemies of our liberty and our civilization,\u201d he explained on X.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s the day when the elites crushed their legitimacy.<\/p>\n<p>Many of us would have liked to \u201ctrust the experts\u201d at a time of such confusion and loss, but they <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2025\/09\/30\/us-news\/biden-admin-put-americans-who-flouted-covid-mask-mandate-on-no-fly-list-which-is-usually-reserved-for-terrorists\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">made that an impossible thing<\/a> to do.<\/p>\n<p>The experts were openly lying, and on June 5, 2020, they made that all too clear.<\/p>\n<p>And this country has yet to recover from their lies.<\/p>\n<p>A few weeks ago, a survey by health policy research and polling firm KFF found that fewer than half of Americans believe in the credibility of any of our health agencies.<\/p>\n<p>Only 40%, for example, believe the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will \u201cact independently without interference from outside interests.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Quite high, actually, for an agency that on Feb. 7, 2021, took a call from teachers\u2019 union honcho Randi Weingarten and <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2023\/06\/02\/texts-reveal-exchange-between-cdc-director-teachers-union-boss-before-school-reopening-memo\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">agreed to keep schools closed<\/a> even longer at her behest.<\/p>\n<p>The wrong and harmful response to COVID-19 isn\u2019t something that happened to us; it\u2019s something that was done to us.<\/p>\n<p>And it was done by extremely partisan health officials who cared far more about furthering their political goals than about the breakdown of trust they would inevitably cause.<\/p>\n<p>The anniversaries matter. Let\u2019s remember all of them.<\/p>\n<p>Karol Markowicz is the host of the \u201cKarol Markowicz Show\u201d and \u201cNormally\u201d podcasts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every year for the last six, we\u2019ve commemorated the key dates of the COVID-19 saga. March 11, when&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":846217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,49627,7824,17261,57213,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,16728,7237,28520,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-846216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-coronavirus","tag-coronavirus-in-ny","tag-george-floyd","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-opinion","tag-pandemics","tag-protests","tag-riots","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116697768871955684","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/846217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}