Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Deborah Brix, White House coronavirus response coordinator, listen to President Donald Trump speak at the daily briefing of the White House Coronavirus Task Force at the White House in Washington on April 16, 2020. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

As CCP Virus Brings a Taste of Fascism, Trump Needs to End US Overreaction

Commentary

Now that President Donald Trump has wisely decided to downplay his press briefings regarding the CCP virus with the snarling jackals in the media, it’s time for the White House to move on to far more important matters.

From the available data, and the increasing preponderance of the evidence, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which is commonly known as the novel coronavirus and causes the disease COVID-19, has turned out to be only slightly more lethal than a normal seasonal flu—but the damage it’s done to our nation’s economy, our Constitution, and our sense of national pride has been incalculable.

Forget the pandemic—it’s time to flatten the panic curve.

The fact is, the United States has just gotten a good long look at the ugly face of fascism, brought on by an overreliance on medical professionals with great taste in scarves, preening for the cameras and basking in media adoration, but without an ounce of domestic policy sense.

They’ve been aided and abetted by a hostile, ignorant White House press corps—when all you know is politics, everything looks political—intent on courting a coup against the president and determined to keep alternative viewpoints from the public as long as they can.

In this, they have willing collaborators in Big Tech, which has inflicted its peculiar brand of censorship via YouTube and Facebook to make sure nothing escapes the Washington bubble’s imprimatur regarding what constitutes acceptable public opinion.

Prime example: a YouTube video that featured two doctors in rural California. Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi who, having conducted more than 5,000 coronavirus virus tests, concluded: “We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths [from flu] in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter-in-place. No shutting down businesses. Do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is emphatically no.”

For this effrontery, and even though the video was posted by a local ABC affiliate in Bakersfield, YouTube took it down, claiming it violated the channel’s increasingly tetchy “terms of service.”

Moving the Goalposts

Let’s look at the facts.

“The vast majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19,” notes Dr. Scott Atlas, the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.

Worse, flattening the curve—the original stated goal of the statists—does nothing to prevent the disease; rather by isolating people in “cocoons,” it simply delays the inevitable point at which most people have had the virus, created antibodies, and “herd immunity” is achieved.

But, of course, it’s not about flattening the curve to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients anymore. Like most of the apocalyptic forecasts, the predicted surge never occurred.

The Navy hospital ship Comfort, sent to New York City with much fanfare, is heading back to its home port in Norfolk, Virginia, having treated all of 182 patients; NYC’s Javits convention center, which was retrofitted as a 2,500-bed hospital for non-corona patients, only ever saw about 500 beds actually used.

Instead, the goalposts have been moved. This is the “new normal,” some cry, and that we’ll all be staring into the future behind face masks, forever. We can’t reopen until we have a vaccine, say others—never mind that we don’t even have a vaccine for the common cold.

Nor is the media’s current metric of testing very useful, since testing only tells us whether you have, or possibly have had, the virus and has no predictive or prophylactic value whatsoever. As history shows over and over, sometimes even bad things simply have to run their course.

Safety Versus Freedom

That won’t stop the left from blaming the pandemic on the Trump administration.

“If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?” a reporter asked the other day.

Never mind that, on average, nearly 8,000 Americans die every day, which equals that war’s death toll in a single week. In addition, by way of comparison, some 80,000 Americans died of the flu and its complications during the 2017–18 season—and who’s afraid of the flu?

If you’re an American living anywhere but New York City and its immediate suburbs, you have next to no chance of catching COVID-19.

As is their custom, the left and its media lackeys have been appealing to the natural human desire for safety as if that were the only factor worth considering. But it’s not. We know whom the disease especially targets—the very elderly, the infirm, the obese, the comorbid. We can protect these people without punishing or beggaring the rest of the population.

That’s where the president comes in. The president can’t, on his own toot, command that the country reopen tomorrow. Under our federalist system, that authority lies with the governors, some of whom, such as Kristi Noem in South Dakota, never closed their states in the first place. (“I took an oath to uphold the United States Constitution,” she said.)

But he can lead by example—by relishing his role as the chief executive and defender of the Bill of Rights, and making sure that freedom under the rule of law, not “safety,” remains the primary American value.

With that in mind, Attorney General William Barr has ordered U.S. attorneys across the country to monitor the actions of the more extreme governors (California’s Gavin Newsom, Virginia’s Ralph Northam, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, and New York’s Andrew Cuomo come immediately to mind) for possible violations of the Bill of Rights, especially the right to freely practice one’s religion and the right of peaceful assembly.

“I am directing each of our United States Attorneys to also be on the lookout for state and local directives that could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens,” he wrote.

Breaking Out Old Glory

As the death toll from COVID-19 recedes, though, the left has a new weapon to use against the hated Trump: The coming economic recession they have long predicted and now, in part because of them, will arrive just in time for the election.

At the same time, they’re frantically advocating a mail-in election, something that will only magnify the kinds of found-ballot fraud that has won important elections in Washington state, Connecticut, and Minnesota, for leftist candidates over the past couple of decades.

Meanwhile, the threats from abroad haven’t ceased. Nobody knows what North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is up to, or even whether he’s still alive. The Russians haven’t stopped playing their version of the Great Game on the oil and other geopolitical fronts. And China needs to be punished severely for its CCP virus mischief, especially if it can be proven that COVID-19 was a malicious attack on the United States and the West.

If the president wants to win reelection, he’s right to stop jousting with the press corps, and instead to break out Old Glory and announce that this unconstitutional and economy-busting overreaction is over—and will never happen again.

Michael Walsh is the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history, will be published later this year by St. Martin’s Press. Follow him on Twitter @dkahanerules.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.