No one expressed it more clearly than Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor at Yale University, epidemiologist, and AIDS activist. On March 23, Gonsalves tweeted: “As a friend of mine said this weekend: ‘There are no natural or social laws preventing us from remaking the economy for the next 18 months, the next years, or forever…. There are only political and cultural barriers, barriers we must overcome….‘”
Similarly, Michael Hiltzik, a left-leaning columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in May that the coronavirus could boost plans for universal basic income-government provided welfare payments for all. (In October, actress and liberal activist Jane Fonda would express an even blunter take: “I just think Covid is God’s gift to the left.”)
Alex Berenson, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2021), 113.