Far from uniting America as 9/11 temporarily did, the Wuhan virus pandemic is further illustrating her profound political divide. In fact, as anti-lockdown protests arise across the nation, left-wing activists dropped makeshift body bags in front of President Trump’s properties. Moreover, authorities under a governor who recently said the Bill of Rights is “above my pay grade” just arrested a woman for organizing an anti-lockdown rally in their state capital.

Yet left largely unsaid is that the people might take virus mitigation measures more seriously if they were devised with more seriousness; instead, it’s clear that politicians’ judgments are colored by political ambition, power lust, prejudices, political correctness, panicked minds, and constitutional ignorance.

The Daily Mail provided a good summary of the current division, writing:

• Protestors chanted ‘fire Fauci’ at a coronavirus lockdown rally in Austin, Texas, on Saturday

• They were referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top immunologist and infectious disease expert

• Kim Pagan, of Toms River, New Jersey, was arrested for organizing the anti-lockdown rally in Trenton

• Gov. Phil Murphy [D-N.J.] first implemented the coronavirus emergency orders last month

• Several COVID-19 anti-lockdown protests were held by upset citizens around the United States on Friday

• Protests happened in places like New Hampshire, Maryland, Virginia and New Jersey

• Anti-Trump activists laid makeshift body bags in front of Trump’s properties to protest his outbreak response

• President Trump doubled down on his tweets to ‘LIBERATE’ Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia

• He told reporters at Friday’s White House briefing that the Democratic governors in those three states could have gotten the same result with less restrictions

• Trump also said the protesters, many of whom were Trump supporters, were ‘treated a little bit rough’

They’re also being treated more than a little bit irrationally, which just helps catalyze the protests. As to this, The New American reported Thursday that Michigan, which has truly onerous lockdown measures, had just had the largest anti-lockdown rally to date.

These events are frowned upon by the Big Brother politicians relying on a Big Brother Wuhan virus “cure” that may be worse than the disease. Just consider how — in keeping with the notion, recently tweeted by a police department, that “protesting is a non-essential activity” — a “woman who helped organize a COVID-19 anti-lockdown protest in New Jersey was charged for defying stay-at-home orders on Friday,” reported the Mail.

“The New Jersey Attorney General’s office said Kim Pagan, of Toms River, was charged with violating emergency orders after she organized a protest against the state’s lockdown in Trenton,” the paper continued.

The authorities might complain that such people aren’t taking the current “crisis” seriously, and the Wuhan virus is — let me not be misunderstood — a serious disease. For it does affect certain people profoundly and has cost lives. The problem? The authorities often don’t reflect seriousness themselves.

While there are always lawbreakers among us, most people will accept laws and restrictions if they are just. But it’s apparent that this is not always the case in our current situation. Consider the following examples:

• Chief executives such as Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.) — called “The Worst Governor in America” — prohibit elective procedures such as joint replacements but allow prenatal infanticide (aka abortion) to continue, shut down churches but keep liquor stores and marijuana dispensaries open, and ban the sale of food-plant seeds but continue selling lottery tickets (which bring the states revenue). Verdict: irrational.

• Governors apply the same virus-driven lockdown rules to relatively unaffected rural areas that they do to big-city hot spots. Example: The Illinois government lists nine counties with zero virus cases, 12 others with only one, and eight others with only two, while the city of Chicago has more than 12,000. Yet all these places are locked down. Why? Because politicians are afraid of being called “racist.” Verdict: political correctness-induced economic destruction.

• Statist politicians use the virus scare to advance a hard-left agenda via trillion-dollar “stimulus” packages, with Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) telling his fellow travelers that such a bill is “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” One commentator today cleverly called this a “flu d’état.” Verdict: power lust-fueled opportunism with a possible dose of sociopathy.

• A Department of Homeland Security science and technology report finds that midday sunlight destroys the Wuhan virus after just three minutes, according to the Epoch Times. Moreover, many epidemiologists say that the best way to mitigate a respiratory disease is to go outside. Nonetheless, politicians have closed parks, arrested people for using them, and encourage everyone to stay indoors. Verdict: ignorance often combined with value-signaling.

I’ve often citied Professor Knut Wittkowski, the former longtime head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City, who stated that lifting the lockdowns would cause the Wuhan virus to be “exterminated” in weeks via herd immunity. Note that the number of virus-related deaths in Sweden, a nation that has adopted this strategy, is “much less than in italy, Spain and the U.K. [which are locked down], both in absolute and relative terms,” according to Bloomberg news (video on Sweden below).

Yet we won’t explore such possibilities when trading prudence for panic and silencing debate. There’s another problem as well: Politicians don’t even dare consider Wittkowski’s thesis because, if it’s valid, it means they’ve ravaged our economy and destroyed lives for nothing. Such a revelation would destroy them. So they have great incentive to dissemble, rationalize, and throw “good money after bad” as they follow the only path they consider politically feasible: to keep us in our hole — and keep on digging.

Of course, they can and will always say, as Governor Murphy already has, that models show how many more people would have died were it not for their lockdowns. These are the same models, do note, whose Wuhan virus projections have been consistently wrong all along.

Photo: AP Images

Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.