You would think that this wouldn’t need to be stated. But in post-reality America it does.

The media has been cranking out clickbait headlines like “The day after X, the number of coronavirus cases rose Z percent.”

X can be a reopen protest rally or a state partially reopening. It doesn’t matter. It’s fodder for the post-intelligent who are convinced that they are smart because they listen to the media and carefully repeat back everything it says to feel smart.

“Look at what those COVIDIOTS did! We have the stats. Science is on our side!”

Rarely has the inability to process the difference between correlation and causation been this pathetic and despicable. 

1. To state the obvious, coronavirus numbers rising a day after X has nothing to do with X. This isn’t The Stand. The coronavirus isn’t that infectious and its symptoms don’t develop that quickly and the events in question are too limited to produce this level of exposure anyway. It’s not like half the state’s population is running through the streets sneezing on each other.

2. Infection numbers rise for a variety of reasons. Deaths are an obvious one. But testing is the usual one. The tests also take time, both to get and to process and then to assemble the data.

Of course the average idiot repeating what he hears from the media doesn’t process this. Information, like science, is magic. It arrives the way that it does in movies as the result of ineffable processes. Everything is known. All that’s left is to recognize the obvious.

The media serves up that myth for ideological reasons and makes its own viewers, listeners, and readers all the dumber for it.