CNN on Wednesday aired what was ostensibly a segment about the evils of QAnon. But watching it the whole way through, viewers would realize it was more precisely a story about how economic lockdowns, championed by Democrats, have wreaked havoc on the minds of ordinary people.
Ashley Vanderbilt, the mother of a 4-year-old daughter in South Carolina, told CNN that she’s never been a news consumer but that she came across political videos on social media during the early days of the 2020 campaign. They convinced her that with President Biden’s election, “We’re all gonna die. We’re going to be owned by China.” (That hasn’t happened, but there’s still time.)
She said that she cried, “like, that ugly cry,” on Inauguration Day and that she “expected a blackout. I expected the TV to go black and nothing to work.”
CNN, of course, represented this sad story as an example of how Trump supporters bought into a strange and dangerous internet-based lie that was tacitly promoted by then-President Donald Trump himself, ultimately leading to the riot at the Capitol last month.
But that’s not what Vanderbilt’s story is about. How exactly did this seemingly normal woman who was only tangentially engaged in politics suddenly break into a fever, causing her hallucinations about Marshall Law and Trump as a Christ-like figure? Well, she explained how.
“I think I spent a lot of time this year isolated from everybody,” she said. “You know, I’ve just been home a lot. I’ve lost my job, last April in 2020, and I was super depressed, and I think, in a way, I lost touch with a little bit of reality and almost that common sense.”
She said that the result of the lockdowns had her “stressed out all the time” and that she took a lot of it out on her daughter.
The toll that the lockdown took on Vanderbilt’s life isn’t at all unique. Just a couple of weeks into the initial nationwide lockdown last year, nearly a quarter of women in the United States said it had a “major impact” on their mental health. In June of last year, 13% of adults said they had started or increased substance abuse due to COVID-19. Hospital admissions for overdoses have spiked.
True, some of the problems had to do with individuals losing loved ones due to the virus, but medical professionals attribute much if not most of them to the resulting lockdowns. Mickey Ashpole, the founder and CEO of Fort Wayne Recovery in Fort Wayne, Indiana, told a local news channel, “One common thing [with relapses] is isolation. So, you just stay in your room, you drink, you get high, you don’t associate with other people … adding a mandated quarantine on top of that is really depressing.”
Democrats pretend that they’re opposed to lockdowns, but they’re not. Look at California, President Biden’s governing model. Where they govern, Democrats’ most generous offer is that businesses reduce their capacity and institute a bunch of rules that make it miserable to patronize restaurants and other venues. All of it is costing people their jobs, and they’re stuck at home, spending too much time on Facebook as they scour obscure regions of the internet for meaning and answers about why their lives have been turned upside down.
Vanderbilt is one of the many casualties of coronavirus lockdown policies.
