Shoppers visit a Costco Wholesale in Tigard, Ore., Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020, after reports of Oregon’s first case of coronavirus was announced in the nearby Oregon city of Lake Oswego on Friday. (AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus)

Smarter people than me have noted over the years that totalitarianism always arrives wearing a smiley face. Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” I fear we are on the cusp of totalitarianism taking root in America and it has not come on the strength of $100,000 in Facebook ads bought by a Russian troll farm. It has been propelled here by a virus that most likely represents an interspecies jump of an everyday virus from some pre-soup bat at a live market in Wuhan, China, to a human.

The extent to which the government, at all levels, driven on by the frenzied bleating of our national media has used this virus to lay siege to our civil liberties has been nothing short of astounding. The degree to which Americans have gone along with this slow-motion revolution has been shocking.

Ridiculous shelter-in-place orders are zealously enforced:

Parking lots at Ashbridges Bay and Woodbine Beach Park are closed. Vehicles parking within park could be subject to a fine and/or tow. #COVID2019 @TPS55Div pic.twitter.com/UhtUxuAYGW — Jesse Weeks (@TPSSgtWeeks) April 5, 2020

Seriously…stay home.

Two visitors from Fremont decided that Shelter in Place did not apply to them, claiming "it is not that serious."

WRONG ANSWER. To help them understand, we cited for driving car on Cowell's beach & not #SIP per the Order. Fine up to $1000. #SantaCruzPolice pic.twitter.com/6kBH3QQcnK — Santa Cruz Police (@SantaCruzPolice) April 2, 2020

New rule means possible $1000 fine for playing football, Frisbee at beach. http://t.co/HI8EmcrZ LA county also bans digging deep sand holes. — Yahoo (@Yahoo) February 9, 2012

FROM THE MAYOR’S DESK

PUBLIC SAFETY ORDER AND DIRECTIVE – CURFEW Esmeralda Moya, Mayor pic.twitter.com/ty6JOZ8STj — City of Galena Park (@CityGalenaPark) April 5, 2020

City ordinances are forbidding the sale of merchandise in otherwise open stores based on bureaucratic whim:

DENVER — It's an unprecedented move in uncharted times: big chains like Target and Walmart are seeing non-essential aisles roped off in Summit County. https://t.co/GhEV8Lflll — april clark (@aprillynnclark) March 29, 2020

Pastors have been arrested for holding services:

This is the face of tyranny. Hillsborough Country Sheriff @HCSOSheriff arrests a Tampa Bay pastor for holding Sunday services. Listen to this authoritarian thug smugly justify. By the way, the "orders" by the President and CDC are just recommendations and have no force of law. https://t.co/EWK6V4qXu9 — Mark Pantano (@TheMarkPantano) March 30, 2020

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has threatened to permanently close any church that holds services.

The use of the word “permanently” transforms this from the realm of potentially defensible short-term measure into the realm of profound malice and disgrace. https://t.co/HqZjHHy9Q3 — Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) March 29, 2020

Senior officials openly muse about their fantasies of a nationwide shelter-in-place order.

Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested the federal government should impose a nationwide stay-at-home order to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the United States https://t.co/nX8TMI4Lc5 — POLITICO (@politico) April 3, 2020

And attempts are made to shame Americans into submission:

Dr. Birx: Our data makes clear that not every American is following the CDC guidance, inhibiting/delaying our ability to bend the national curve. Follows this with a call to action: Effectively, get with the program. Now. — Guy Benson (@guypbenson) April 2, 2020

The official government slogan of 30 Days to Slow the Spread has been in effect for 32 days, as of today, and shows no signs of an end in the near future.

Don’t be deceived. We will not be allowed to return to the status quo ante after this bug is just part of the ecosystem any more than Germany was allowed to return to the status quo ante after Marinus van der Lubbe kept his appointment with the fallbeil. We have been fundamentally changed as a nation.

This pandemic has shown that our government not respect civil liberties or recognize any concept of personal agency. The First Amendment, which guarantees our right to peaceably assemble, has been absolutely shutdown by politicians and bureaucrats declaring that it was illegal to do so. It is no more permissible to forbid people from going to the beach because of some inchoate and ill-defined risk to themselves than it is to prevent them from holding political rally…something which would also be forbidden. This is power that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon never dreamed of exercising during the height of the Vietnam War protests and the “Days of Rage.”

If churches are locked, with the complicity of their clergy based upon government fiat and pastors are arrested for holding church services (sadly, no Catholic priests have yet stepped forward to do their duty to their flocks in the face of the obeisance of their hierarchy to Caesar), then freedom of religion has been defined down to a personal hobby from a human right in a way that Barack Obama could never have dreamed.

If a mayor can forbid a store to sell merchandise because of Wuhan virus, then he or she can forbid a store from selling merchandise for any other ‘public health crisis.’ And let’s be serious here, the limiting of merchandise that can be sold has zero to do with transmission of the Wuhan virus and everything to do with government staking out its right to control your life. Once you are in the store, your risk of spreading or contracting the virus neither increases nor decreases based upon the goods you buy any more than a 9 p.m. curfew keeps you safe.

And this is the start. The people pushing this are watching and observing and taking notes and are very happy with what they see.

The course of action charted by the federal and state governments here have inflicted hardship all out of proportion to the damage potential of the virus. And they have done it in a way that guarantees we go through this again in November. Widespread infection, when some 80% of everyone catching the virus recovers completely with few or no symptoms would build the herd immunity we need to render the Wuhan virus irrelevance. The social distancing nonsense simply preserves a large population with no immunity that will be as susceptible to the virus in the autumn as it is now and give rise to yet another round of social controls. (Amazingly, in short, we’ve devastated the economy and spent trillions of dollars and sacrificed our liberties and our birthright and we have nothing to show for it, not even the proverbial mess of pottage.)

Now that government knows that it can do this and that our elites and our media will stand idly by…along with the great mass of the citizenry as well…as precious liberties are sacrificed on the altar of ephemeral fear, fear will be our constant companion as government refuses to give up its newly won power.