Short, plain summary: a son’s funeral during COVID, the inconsistent rules that followed, and how politicized science on COVID, climate, and gender shattered his trust in the Left while leaving his confidence in science intact.
On April 9, 2020 my father died at 73, and six days later we buried him in a small family service. The burial felt stripped of ceremony: a cold day, a few close relatives, and constant reminders to stand apart from each other. A worker kept telling us to stay ten feet away from the pastor, my widowed mother, and my kids, who were 13, ten, and six.
My dad served in Vietnam as a Storekeeper on the U.S.S. Yellowstone, but there were no military honors, no flag, no “Taps.” Only because a friend intervened did a trio from the Burlington VFP Post Honor Guard appear for a quick salute. I cried through the pastor’s blessing while hugs and normal comforts were forbidden; instead I walked out and got a massive tattoo because tattoo parlors were deemed “essential.”
Weeks earlier, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers had handed down orders that shut schools and limited gatherings, supposedly to keep people safe. We were told “two weeks to flatten the curve” and many accepted it as a small sacrifice. I worked in a hospital and got a paper calling me one of those “essential workers,” which helped some colleagues when stopped by police during curfews.
If you questioned those restrictions you were smeared as “grandma killers” or “anti-science,” as if asking for evidence made you immoral. We were told that assembling or protesting was too risky and might spread COVID, so contact and comfort were criminalized. Masks became inconsistent theater: required in some spaces, optional in others, and full of exceptions that made no coherent sense.
Then on May 25, 2020 George Floyd died in police custody and everything shifted overnight. Black Lives Matter protests were treated as crucial public assemblies, somehow immune to the virus that had closed churches and canceled funerals. George Floyd, a career criminal who was high on a cocktail of drugs when he died, had not one, not two, but three funerals that summer, with crowds and civic leaders attending where my family had been told to disperse.
The contrast was stark: a veteran in a shallow grave, a grieving family told we didn’t matter, and a different public response for a criminal who drew giant crowds. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stood among the mourners who would have otherwise kept distance from ordinary citizens. For me and for my older kids, that moment cracked something deep: fairness and consistency vanished in favor of political theater.
For many, that collapse in consistency meant a loss of faith in institutions and in the supposedly neutral “experts” that spoke for them. Chemist Simon Maechling laments the erosion of trust in science, and for good reason: when institutions stop being consistent, people stop listening.
I still trust science in principle, but I stopped trusting the way the Left weaponized science to push political agendas. Saying one thing when it served power and another when it didn’t turned objective inquiry into a sermon. When policies were applied unevenly and explanations were half-baked, the public smelled the politics and reacted accordingly.
Look at climate alarmism: as kids we were warned that New York and Florida would sink and acid rain would kill us, yet decades later those apocalyptic deadlines passed without catastrophe. The goalposts were simply moved, then reset again with the same urgency. Activists demanded collectivist fixes—15-minute cities, rationed travel, bans on pets and meat—while elites kept private jets and oceanfront homes.
That hypocrisy undermines the argument. When the proposed “solutions” sounded lifted from Marx, people stopped listening to the earnest science and started hearing ideology. The spectacle of high-profile environmentalists preaching sacrifice while living indulgent lives sealed the disconnect between message and messenger.
Gender politics delivered the same pattern: we once taught clear biological basics, namely that sex is assigned at conception via X or Y chromosomes. Exceptions exist, but the overwhelming majority are male or female based on DNA. Suddenly, that settled biology was rebranded as a flexible spectrum where external anatomy no longer mattered to policy or law.
Now we are told women can have penises and men can become pregnant, and language shifted to “persons who menstruate” or “birthing persons.” My governor even used terms like “inseminated persons” in official documents, prioritizing ideology over clarity. Meanwhile, young girls were told to compete against biological males in sports, costing championships, safety, and opportunities while federal agencies pushed rules to erase those objections.
I trust science that is coherent, testable, and applied consistently: lab origins for COVID merit scrutiny, lock downs and prolonged school closures caused harms, and climate is complex and not solved by virtue signaling. I also believe DNA defines sex; drugs and surgery change appearances but not chromosomes. Men cannot get pregnant and women do not have penises.
Science delivered vaccines, treatments, and breakthroughs that saved lives, and when it stays methodical and honest I respect it. But when the Left strips the method and dresses ideology up as incontrovertible truth, it turns science into a faith you are not allowed to question. That is why people stopped trusting the political actors cloaking themselves as scientists.
My view is simple: I trust the real, empirical science that can be debated and tested, and I refuse to trust a political movement that twists facts to fit narratives. I have always trusted the science; I do not trust the Left, and never will.
