A handful of items while waiting for the announcement that enough is enough and it’s time for everybody to go back to work, which it’s quickly becoming President Trump’s responsibility to make. More on that below.

1. The Tyranny of the Karens

This is, I’ll agree, grossly unfair to the Karens. On the other hand, there are some truly awful things going on out there, and there’s a certain type of American who seems to be contributing to the problem more than anybody else.

A “Karen” is a meme that has taken off in recent months, because the “Karen” attitude has become ubiquitous across the country, and with the ChiCom virus surfacing as the dominant event in American life it’s turned quite toxic.

What are we talking about here? The mostly, but certainly not all, white, middle-class, middle-aged woman who before the virus came along was best known for the “let me talk to your manager” haircut and the air of entitlement while spouting pieties and pop psychology she saw on daytime talk TV. The internet has decided this is a “Karen,” though it goes without saying all women named Karen don’t fit the archetype, and it certainly doesn’t stop with women named Karen.

The problem is that the Karens, in the age of the ChiCom virus, have gone from obnoxious to dangerous. The Karens are the ones calling the police because someone took their kid to the park, and the Karens are on social media demanding that pastors be arrested for holding church services.

In the past week it seems there is a rash of people ratting on their neighbors for holding Easter gatherings, jogging in the neighborhood, and engaging in other perfectly normal activities that, thanks to the virus frenzy, are now somehow sinister.

The personality type that was jokingly referred to as the Karens, the one that takes upon itself the responsibility to enforce whatever new directive from cultural, political, or other authorities has been mostly recently ingested, is in its heyday.

It’s not really necessary to outline how corrosive all this is. Suffice it to say the breakdown in trust and cooperation among neighbors and members of the community that comes from busybodies playing petty tyrant as we all chafe against the national shutdown will easily outlast the ChiCom virus. It won’t be forgotten, and we’re all worse off for it.

The last column in this space talked about the reckoning that must come with China and the incompetent politicians who so gleefully locked down American life. Those are political reckonings. But the social reckonings, which will be the ones most people notice most prominently, are coming as well.

If you’re a Karen, now would be a good time to ratchet back your enthusiasm for enforcing the New Normal on your neighbors. People have long memories, and they’re coming to their wits’ ends. We should all be mindful not to make unnecessary enemies amid the difficulties still to come.

2. What was the point of the shutdown, again?

Remember what the purpose of locking down our economy and civil society was in the first place?

It was to “flatten the curve” of the ChiCom virus’ spread, so as to prevent the health-care system being overloaded with virus patients and having it break down.

We now know the health-care system is not going to be overloaded. State by state this is now obviously true. Even in hotspots like New York and Louisiana the hospitals aren’t full, and they never were in any actual danger of exceeding capacity.

Now, there were data models the “experts” relied upon to inform policymakers the system was in danger of cracking, but those models utterly failed to predict the numbers the virus generated. We talked about that in this space last week. It’s a fundamentally important discussion, but not one central to this point.

If you want to afford the politicians their moment of glory in claiming that the shutdown prevented the health-care system from breaking, fine. True or not, it doesn’t govern the here and now.

The fact is, the health-care system isn’t overwhelmed, and there is no reasonable danger of it being overwhelmed. Additionally, there is a non-invasive, inexpensive, and readily available treatment for the virus that has generated unmistakable results, meaning we now have a viable method to keep the vast majority of people who might come down with the virus from being very seriously ill.

What this means is there is no longer a justification for the shutdown. None. If the health-care system won’t be overwhelmed with virus patients, people need to get back to work. The cure is now far worse than the disease.

3. Yamiche shouldn’t have a job in journalism

If you saw the horrific exchange between mouth-breathing moron Yamiche Alcindor from PBS and Surgeon General Jerome Adams at Friday’s White House press conference, you saw the depths to which the Washington media has sunk.

Alcindor, who is a poor woman’s Helen Thomas — she manages to mimic the batty, insipid questions Thomas became famous for when she had lost her marbles late in her career, except Alcindor hasn’t had a prime to be past — launched into Adams for having made statements admonishing the black community about risky behavior. Adams noted that because the virus is taking a disproportionate toll among African Americans, things like smoking, drinking, and drug use are potential turbochargers of complications from a COVID-19 infection and ought to be curbed in that community, and he suggested people spread the message to “Granddaddy and Big Momma” and other members of their families.

Alcindor considered that a racist and offensive characterization. How dare Adams refer to black grandmothers as “Big Mommas.”

Adams refers, he noted when attacked by Alcindor, to his own grandmother as Big Momma. Adams is black, as you surely know.

There have been a great many humiliating national moments coming from the White House Press Corps in recent years. This might have been the worst of the lot.

If PBS was a channel worthy of your tax dollars, Yamiche Alcindor would be fired on Monday. She won’t, and it isn’t, and it’s time for PBS, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to be cut loose from the federal teat once and for all. Let advertisers pay Yamiche’s salary if this brand of “journalism” is truly worthy.

4. The least surprising study of all time is …

… the Pew survey indicating that white liberals are more likely than anyone else to suffer from depression and poor mental health.

Hey guys, it’s science.

5. I’m looking forward to President Fauci’s last day on the job.

We could do a whole column about the urgent necessity of relieving Fauci, who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. But for our purposes here, all we really need is to reference what he said last week.

This man actually touted the possibility of giving “immunity papers” that would confer upon their holders the freedom to move about the country.

Forget about the ChiCom virus. Any government that would consider such a totalitarian, obnoxious, and unconstitutional regime deserves to be broken into microscopic pieces. It’s better if the fanciful 2.2 million Americans would succumb to the ChiCom virus than for our society to collapse into that level of fascist dictatorship.

Nobody elected Anthony Fauci. Who is he to even speculate about such a dystopian idea in the public square?

It looks like Fauci put himself on the hot seat Sunday when he fell for a line of questioning by CNN’s Jake Tapper that ended in his alleging that had President Trump shut the country down in February, lives would be saved. That led to Trump retweeting a tweet from DeAnna Lorraine, a Republican running against Nancy Pelosi in California, that included the hashtag #FireFauci. Whether that was just a brushback pitch at Fauci or a harbinger of a personnel move is unknown, but the bet would be on the latter given Trump’s track record with respect to longtime Washington swamp creatures.

It isn’t like Fauci’s record in his job has been all that great. Just look at the abject failure of the government to do effective ChiCom virus testing. Fauci’s been in that job since 1984; why was the federal government not prepared to effectively test for a coronavirus?

And now he wants to give people immunity papers?

Let’s move on from this man. We can do better.