What is this political cartoon by Bob Moran titled "Amnesty" about?

Question

I saw that Bob Moran made this political cartoon that he posted on Twitter:

When I first saw this cartoon, I assumed it was poking fun at the "False Balance" AKA "bothsidesism" argument that is usually deployed in conservative circles. Also I see that it was copyrighted by The Democracy Fund (bottom left) which is a left leaning charitable organization.

However, from what I understand, Bob Moran is pretty right leaning/libertarian. So whats going on here? Am I misunderstanding the cartoon? Or am I incorrect about Bobs political leanings?

Answer 1

The cartoon seems to be a response to an article in The Atlantic, "Let's Declare a Pandemic Amnesty". The article pleads to not judge too harshly the people who advocated or imposed stringent measures against COVID, especially the measures taken in the early days of the pandemic, which sometimes proved to be ineffective or over the top.

Bob Moran seems to be very much on the side of the various groups that opposed (and still oppose) those measures. These groups have likened some of the measures to a witch hunt, especially the measures targeting individuals on basis of what measures (such as masking, vaccinating) those individuals took, for instance mandating masks at various places such as schools and stores.

His cartoon should be understood in light of this. The women being burned at the stake represent the people who opposed the measures, while the witch hunters represent the government that imposed the measures, the entities (businesses, schools) that enforced them, and the people who adhered to them and called out others for not adhering.
His point being that amnesty means nothing to the (in his view) victims.

Answer 2

An article recently came out in the Atlantic magazine entitled Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty. This article advocated for "political amnesty" for the perhaps over the top responses to the covid pandemic that included extensive lockdowns and remote learning for children. The article has been widely and wildly attacked by right wing media, for example, No Amnesty for Pandemic Tyranny, and of course, Fox News (starting at about 2:40 into the video).

Bob Moran lost his job at The Daily Telegraph due to his own over the top views on the British response to the pandemic. He was and remains very much on the anti-lockdown / antivax side of the pandemic divide. He joined the Democracy Fund because even though they are somewhat left leaning, they also are very strongly pro freedom. Were mistakes made on both sides? Based on his political cartoons, Bob Moran would most likely say the only mistakes that were made were in the form of excessive lockdowns, mandatory vaccines, and mandatory remote learning.

Regarding the Atlantic article that triggered all of this, I suspect the call in that article for "pandemic amnesty" is a proactive response to the expected Republican majority in the US House of Representatives. They will almost certainly take aim on three targets: Hunter Biden and Joe Biden -- and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Answer 3

While I think SQB and others have sewn up the main reason for the cartoon, they missed the underlying problem the article seems to want to gloss over: the open attacks (and sometimes downright demonization) of people who favored less pandemic restrictions. We're not talking about minor issues where people were preaching caution and merely disagreeing with decisions. We're talking full-blown "The sky is falling!" rhetoric that sought to not just persuade, but openly punish people who were not on board with anything trying to keep people "safe", regardless of the impact of said policies.

The Atlantic, in particular, would probably prefer it if we just all forgot about their April 2020 article entitled Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice, about Georgia being one of the first states to begin reopening after the hard shutdowns of March 2020. The byline is equally fiery

The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.

This wasn't some minor piece from one author. This was from their main magazine, and the implications were fairly extreme

Few people in Georgia are eager to be a case study in pandemic exceptionalism, but many won’t have a choice. Jillian Yeskel, the stylist in Roswell, whose Trump-supporting parents voted for Kemp, said she’d had conversations with them in the past week that she couldn’t have dreamed of a few months ago. “I’d assumed they’d support anything Kemp had to say,” she told me. “I talk to my mom every day, and we’re both just so upset with him.”

The article also insinuated Georgia governor Kemp was doing this for racist reasons, and that minorities would bear the brunt of this "sacrificial decision". The actual numbers, however, showed no such sacrifice, something even detractors had to admit

Georgia was the first state to start reopening its economy after shutting down due to the coronavirus pandemic. When the shelter-in-place order expired on April 30, a lot of experts and much of the public worried about the worst: a sustained spike in Covid-19 cases that would overwhelm emergency rooms and lead to a surge in deaths.

Yet more than a month later, the worst hasn’t arrived.

Georgia would see spikes later, but not excessive relative to how other states (and even the world) with stricter rules were seeing. That's what makes the Atlantic article so infuriating to some: they want to pretend it didn't happen

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

There are some hard political conversations that need to be had here. Dr Anthony Fauci, for instance, one one of the leading US voices during the pandemic, due to his position in the National Institute of Health. But Fauci openly admitted he was doling advice out based on where he thought the politics were

When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent.

Mind you, these sorts of things erode confidence, especially when people are using such statements to do things like extend lockdowns or close schools (Bill de Blasio, then mayor of New York City, at one point, threatened to permanently close any house of worship that tried to reopen). An on-point rebuttal made this point

But the questions in the pandemic were not just factual disputes about a disease that was evolving quickly. They were also disputes about whether the Bill of Rights mattered anymore. Think of Bill de Blasio, telling Christians, Jews, and other religious believers that they had to abide by the city’s rule against gatherings of ten or more people, even as he himself was violating these rules in public support of the George Floyd protests.

Trying to just say (as the comic does) "mistakes were made on both sides" after you've burned people at the stake misses the problem of how you got there at the first place.

Answer 4

Assuming that the people in the Twitter thread interpret the cartoon in the way it was meant, the cartoon is about the critical analysis of the mainstream approach to Covid, seen from the perspective of the anti-vaxxers.

The idea is roughly as follows:

1. Mainstream sources are discussing aspects in which the response to Covid was not perfect.
2. To admit that the mainstream approach was not perfect is, in their logic, tantamount to claiming equivalence between it and the anti-vaxxers.
3. This strawman claim of "fault on both sides" is then attacked by the cartoon, with the implication being that anti-vaxxers were actually innocent of making the pandemic worse.

Answer 5

Depending on where you live, COVID measures were quite drastic.

People lost their jobs, businesses went bankrupt, children and young adults had lots of psychological problems, sometimes even attempted suicide (I personally know of 2 such cases, a neighbor and a nephew). Medical checks and procedures were canceled or postponed, sometimes leading to death.

So there was a lot of collateral damage, often irreversible, like burning witches at the stake.

Another aspect is that critics (e.g. pointing out the above) felt there was some kind of witch hunt going on against them. Derogatory and dehumanizing names (e.g. "plaguerats") were used to silence critics. Some also lost their reputation, job or business as a result.

A call for amnesty might be interpreted as:

• people are aware of these cases
• some fear that they might be found guilty
• some things might not even be known to the public yet

"Mistakes were made" is a classic attempt to defuse guilt.