This pandemic has exposed the motives of our self-appointed betters in D.C. and the media, pushing anti-American policies to give themselves more power.

For all the American people’s common efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, we keep seeing a lot of reckless responses from politicians and propagandists. They continue to shamelessly exploit a national crisis to pursue their own political and personal agendas. Obama-era health care adviser Zeke Emanuel and others are calling for an 18-month shutdown, which is obviously not survivable for America economically or socially.

Media pundits, impervious to the suffering this crisis is causing Americans, persist in trying to use the pandemic to trap President Trump and instill panic. “How many deaths are acceptable, Mr. President?” “Why don’t you shut down the grocery stores, Mr. President?” The list goes on.

It’s time to stop pretending such folks have any interest in the public good. Let’s stop enabling them by taking their policy prescriptions at face value. Instead, I daresay we should confront them by questioning their motives and real goals. No matter how this pandemic ends, we owe it to ourselves and our posterity to put that mindset under a microscope and try to diagnose it.

What Is the Media’s Megalomania Mindset?

First, we are witnessing an attitude that hopes for failure. Trump critics seem to hope for high death counts in America to score political points against the president. This mindset shamelessly manipulates people’s worst fears, such as CBS News using a video from a crowded Italian hospital dealing with coronavirus patients and reporting that it was in New York. CBS pulled that stunt not once, but twice.

The media go ballistic when audiences are exposed to any views that do not coincide with their agenda to accrue and maintain their power and status — hence, mainstream media cries to stop airing Trump’s press briefings on the virus, and now their attempts to get him to stop appearing at them.

Astonishingly, they also want to ban hydroxychloroquine because it could prove to be an effective treatment for Wuhan virus symptoms as we wait for a vaccine. It’s an outlook that also hopes for a stock market crash, ruining the retirement plans of millions of Americans. Many of these folks also run cover for the totalitarian regime of communist China, which suppressed critical information about the outbreak in Wuhan, unleashing the virus on the world.

Second, they seem to be using the crisis to infect American life with anti-American attitudes. For example, officials are empowering petty tyrants to snitch on people who gather “unlawfully,” promising anonymity to the snitches. A rural-area Virginia hospital — not in a hot spot for the virus — is preventing parents from visiting their newborns in neonatal intensive care units.

The governor of Indiana purports to tell Christians whether they may take communion and, if so, how they may take it. The mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, forbade people to attend drive-in church services on Easter morning, even asking congregants to inform on pastors who held services by calling 311. The last thing America needs is a shameful profusion of communist China-styled meddlers and snitches.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff are using the crisis to try to devise another destructive impeachment attempt, sowing yet more chaos into a nation where people are reeling from imposed isolation, economic ruin, and fear of a plague for which there is no cure. What kind of people do such things?

Megalomaniacs Are Always Looking for ‘Awesome Power’

This scenario does not reflect politics as usual at all. It reflects something much darker: a stark naked megalomania intent on controlling the lives of others. These folks feel entitled to play god. This is no overstatement.

Not so long ago, the nation rallied together in times of national crisis. Even members of Congress would set aside partisan interests when many Americans were suffering. We’re beyond that now. Power corrupts. And behind every policy prescription of central planners is a Jabba-sized ego that aims to put itself in charge of others’ lives.

Consider, for example, the 1,400-page socialist-saturated wish list that Pelosi tried to substitute for the Senate relief bill in March. She caused unconscionable delays and disruptions to the lives of millions of Americans.

Pelosi revealed the reason for her self-centered behavior in a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone in which she discussed the prospect of Democrats regaining the House. She could not contain herself as she cried out that it was all about “awesome power.” She excitedly added, “The speaker has awesome power.” Indeed, that is the raison d’etre of all so-called progressives. This is perfectly in line with the structure of socialism, which is always based upon putting too much power in the hands of too few people.

When Majority Whip James Clyburn reportedly told the Democrat caucus that the coronavirus relief bill was “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision,” he was simply echoing Rahm Emanuel’s mindset that a crisis should never “go to waste.”

What is at the bottom of this “vision” to which Clyburn refers? “Awesome power.” Personal power. Political power that always ends up with a top-down elite telling everyone what they may say, what they may think, how they may act, and with whom they may associate.

Those who perpetuate this vision have never made a secret of the fact that they wish to perpetuate their power in the form of a permanent majority. This is nascent communism in a nutshell — or, in today’s parlance, progressivism.

Leftism Is Undeniably Linked to Megalomania

Pelosi’s wish list included several aspects of the Green New Deal, such as demands that airlines “fully offset the annual carbon emissions … for domestic flights beginning in 2025.” She also attempted to put abortion funding into the bill. (Some deny this, but abortion funding tends to be a staple of all Democrat bills and amendments.)

Pelosi included a heavy dose of identity politics, with requirements for “corporate board diversity.” To top it all off, she included enhancements for vote harvesting, such as grants for conducting election audits, as well as same-day voter registration, obvious ingredients for election fraud. That’s just a short list.

It’s no secret that Democrats have worked overtime to destroy policies that promote self-reliance, free speech, choice in education, family cohesion, and religious devotion. But let’s ponder more closely what the sampling of policy prescriptions noted above have in common: They are always about a power elite controlling you.

The Green New Deal, with its focus on tracking every industry and person’s “carbon footprint,” is the perfect vehicle for a power elite to control the masses from the top down. It would cut back severely on people’s mobility and cause greater scarcity of resources, opening the door for nationalizing whole industries. It provides excuses to punish any hint of nonconformity, and it depends on fearmongering — “the burning planet!” — to coerce compliance.

Next, consider the constant push for taxpayer-funded abortion, which has now entered the infanticide phase. What’s that about? It’s an open door to eugenics and further top-down control of the population by elites drunk on power.

The bait for unrestricted abortion has always been sex without any balance of responsibility. But the switch comes in the abortion culture’s dire effects on society: broken homes, broken families, broken relationships, which all fuel an unprecedented loneliness epidemic. Such brokenness further cultivates people’s vulnerability to government dependency and social control by self-supremacists.

Power-hungry elites use identity politics, or the constant push for “diversity,” to divide us by causing tension, discord, and hatred — all of which require government power to address. No more “hate speech,” such as voicing support for traditional marriage or sex distinctions. Under the anti-discrimination coating, identity politics is a poison pill for the First Amendment.

Consider the laser-focus on policing speech by forcing pronoun protocols into our laws. A prime example is a 2015 New York City law that calls for a fine of $250,000 for misgendering someone. Should you be accused, you will likely be at the mercy of an activist judge. The virus of identity politics — along with its twin virus, political correctness — is all about shutting people up and separating them, empowering elites to do more social engineering.

Same-day voter registration and universal mail-in voting is an obvious invitation to election fraud. Normal people know that voting every couple of years is not a hard thing to do. So the point of this election tampering is to bring about a permanent Democrat majority that doesn’t have to bother with real elections anymore.

The Political Left Has a God Complex

This pandemic has laid bare the intentions of our self-appointed betters in Washington, the media, and beyond. They have shown no desire for national unity, pushing policies to empower only themselves. They manipulate people’s worst fears, knowing that’s the surest way to get them to lay down their liberties.

We should be able to see a God-complex at work in all this control-freak behavior, and we should not fear calling out that behavior for what it is. If this seems over-the-top to American readers, that’s because we aren’t used to living under totalitarian rule.

As we just emerged from Holy Week, we would do well to recognize that this is man’s natural, sinful state. After all, the sin of pride, or the conceit of playing god, is the original sin from which all other sins emanate.

Consider that the 1.4 billion people of communist China are at the mercy of this mindset every day, an atheistic mentality hostile to religion and intent on destroying churches and any assembly that does not put the state first. People intent on playing god do not want to compete with the one living God as they try to control the lives of others.

That mindset brought on the miseries of human history. Our founders recognized it because they saw that failing in human nature, and therefore in themselves. There was a time when Americans were taught that the central purpose of the Constitution was to keep that impulse in check so we could have individual liberties. When we refuse to see the urge in ourselves, we are far less able to keep it in check.

We should call out this mindset wherever we see it, and that means questioning the motives of anyone who continuously pushes for policies that undermine individual liberties and build a mass state with a tiny elite controlling us all. No more should Americans simply attribute the totalitarian impulse to good intentions gone astray — certainly not while our economy is on its knees and the nation has undergone the trauma of the media’s fearmongering. The stakes are just too high.